Mall Writing: The Copywriter's Cut

My first attempt to make money without being technically employed consists in writing profiles about shops at a really important and expansive mall in Bangkok, Central World. Mostly to amuse myself, I wrote some profiles that are totally inappropriate. I'll post some of the reviews I'm sure will incur not a small number of cuts from the editor's swift and exacting steel as they come:

DSQUARED

Men's Fashion

To describe the clothing line as anything less than maximalist would be misleading. With an eye for several movements in tasteless fashion over the last two decades, the designers [sic] at DSQUARED clash trite trend after trite trend, contradiction after contradiction, relentlessly, yielding clothes for teenagers and young working men who are probably as seriously confused about their sexuality as they are their aesthetic sensibilities--or perhaps more fairly for those who simply have penchants for camouflage, reggae, Canada, sweater vests and other men. There is nothing inherently homoerotic about camouflage, no. But one should not be misled by the male models advertised around the shop; though the excessively layered and vested model is not reciprocating the macho and totally platonic arm-around-the-shoulder gesture of his scantily clad (underwear, spandex) amigo, he's just being coy. Whether you have a thing for coal mining (re: featured graphic T-shirt of the month) or indecisiveness, this shop is for you!

Willful Unemployment

If my memory serves well, I performed my first job with the same dispassion, disgust, and anomie that I've brought to every job since, including the one through which I currently plod and from which will shortly escape. I'm not one to psychologize, but I certainly did not inherit my parents' faith in industry, so if I were pressed to point to an experience, rather, an epiphany respons ble for what some madmen might diagnose as a recurring malaise, it would have to be when I was fifteen years old, working at T-Bones grocery store, taking people's money, putting it in the cash register, giving customers less money than the amount they gave me, throwing sundries in bags, smiling, and meditating on the two 15- and one 30-minute breaks my eight hour shifts afforded me. Because those intervals of non-work time punctuating the stretches of work time were the preservers of my receding sanity, it became easy for me to distinguish two types of time: time spent working was monotonous, stupefying, painful. Time spent not working was blissful, ambrosiac, Life. The contrast was clear, between working and non-working time. Non-working time was clearly more preferable, so there must have been a perfectly rational explanation as to why I willfully traded a significant chunk, say, 0ne-third, of non-working time for working time: money.

Money had to be properly understood if I were to go on with such self-torture. It was particularly easy because I was playing with the stuff constantly. A woman puts a few frozen dinners, a bag of apples, six snack-packs, one pound of sliced turkey, another of sliced cheese, and a loaf of bread on the conveyor belt. I scan the goods. She gives me $35. I take it and give her $4.67. I take stock of the situation. The woman spent $30.33 on what could very well be her family's dinner for the evening and her child's lunch for the week, or $30.33 towards the (albeit immediate and temporary) sustenance of her family and perhaps an excuse (dinnertime) for that family to congregate, socialize, share. Generalizing backwards, these Nice Things were made possible by stuff like food (for the sustenance of those bodies), non-working time (temporal space for the occasion of dinnertime), working time (for the accumulation of money), and money (for the exchange of Nice Things, like food). So we can see money like this: money is traded for enjoying Nice Things. Working time is what you sacrifice so you can get money, so you can enjoy the Nice Things during non-working time. By algebralogical extension, we can juxtapose non-working time with money; the money you make is how much non-working time, or Life, you relinquish. Furthermore, the Nice Things you can afford with money equals that time you could have spent not working working, i.e., I buy a turkey sandwich for $5.25 and I give up one hour working to earn $5.25; the turkey sandwich cost me one hour of Life (maybe it would only cost you five minutes). Two tickets to a movie, popcorn, sodas, and two hours of unsupervised making out with highschool girlfriend in parents' car equals six and a half hours, which is totally worth it.

Therefore, currency is: the non-working time (Life) one gives up so one can hypothetically afford and enjoy (or so one hopes) Nice Things, however subjectively defined, during the non-working time one has not yet given up for the purpose of affording and enjoying Nice Things. In other words, one trades some of their Life(a) for Life(b) so that the quality of the latter is--in whatever scope or magnitude--better. The problem is that Life(b) is always smaller in quantity than Life(a), and yields a asymptotically decreasing sums of fulfillment at higher ends of currency accumulation. One cannot value the time given up not working for work just in terms of the money earned because that in and of itself is not Nice Things. This is a conclusion that Marxists and Capitalists can agree upon: Money is time, and currency is the physical medium that reifies the latter into the former, however crudely. One fundamental difference between the two, though I have no interest in exploring that chasm here, is that one camp values money more than non-working time--a group, I would venture to guess, that has an undernourished, ultimately frightful valuation of Life, too.

As such, my view of working-time, work, is fairly bleak, regardless of the work. Maybe it's because the Nice Things I enjoy most do not cost me a lot of money (in no particular order: reading, writing, playing music, eating, having sex), that when I think about how much non-working time I give up to working time, I feel confused or just stupid. Although the content of one's job might distract one from staring directly into the eyes of such a miserable situation (if your job, for example, is taking photos of beautiful, maybe naked, women), for most people, all jobs are work and work sucks.

For stupid virtues, like duty or gratitude or something, I maintain my +54 hour/week post at meager wage; I get my daily bowl of chow, but no time to taste it. As I wrote once in my inconsequential editor's column for my inconsequential magazine, I only enjoy coffee insofar as it is an aid to more interesting pursuits, like reading, writing, whatever. So what I get is a shit load of coffee, but to no meaningful end. Rocket fuel, engine, no destination. Daily, I acquire more rocket fuel. If it weren't for the opportunity I steal back from my working time to burn the fuel here, writing, the stuff would surely explode, and my sanity with it.

Fortunately, this is my last week, or last issue, working for the magazine. When I finish this, I will have demoted myself to copyeditor where I will enjoy minimal work and pay, but much, much more Life.

A still murky conception of love notwithstanding...

I have this psychosis-inducing fantasy of meeting a girl in Thailand I could really, truly--like objectively--love. This fantasy seems just as (un)realistic to realize here as anyplace. Different than desire, I never expect fantasy to come to fruition. The criteria I maintain for the fantasy girl I could fall in love with in Thailand is very tight. Observation of the slightest foul audio or visual cue triggers a psychosomatic response that starts with crestfallenness, moves to resignation, onto post-Thanksgiving-day-turkey-feast fatigue/nausea, and finally resolves at term-paper-due-tomorrow-noon anxiety. It is too often that my desires, language, cultural points of reference, and predisposition to what I consider gauche, non-verbally (un)communicative gestures don’t interface well with most people, which is actually fine. Well, it is fine here, in Thailand, because my frustrated expectations I usually find to be wrapped up in some kind of culturally interesting observation, whereas at home, they--my frustrated expectations--are wrapped up in nothing, and so kind of depressing. Moreover, I don’t need to find the fantasy girl I could fall in love with in Thailand; it would be a dangerous thing if we all made such demands of our fantasies. That I come deceivingly close to finding what I think is the fantasy girl I could, once again--objectively--fall in love in Thailand triggers psychosis, or whatever is that arrests my words and breathing and mental chatter when I think I'm visited by one of these specters.

(a)nationalism

I'm from America, and yet I don't feel like an American. The whole idea of a nation state is bogus, outdated, an idea over some 400 years old that followed a continental war, divided power among a handful of power lovers, created identities that the rest of the world would inherit by virtue of being born at a certain place and time. There is no agency involved in assuming this identity; we are elected or banished according to something like divine grace, happenstance, entropy. National identities still hold water for many people, but for those who live in and between the continually expanding pores of different cultures and places, for those who have a stake in creating themselves, such constructs feel unrepresentative and transparently thin.

If I am outside a place, what does it take to be inside it? Being born there? A family? A job? An address? A skin color? A mastery of a language? Or can it just be a choice: this is where I live now. If and when I leave, it will also be where I am from.

Should I Be Doing Something?

The gap in my gut weighs something. It’s a dense condensation of experience, a churning, a forge where sense of self is perpetually fashioned, dismembered, stitched. It is the arena where meaning, purpose, passion, and resignation wrestle; a vacuum that, like an 8-year-old at Xmas, forgets the presents as quickly as they're unwrapped. It’d be good if I could write letters to the past, (un)fill my gut so that it’s not there anymore, that hunger, that nausea, that pacing around the room, thinking about what book to read next, or who to call, but not really wanting to do either because neither really matter or something, so just pacing.

There was a guy lying belly-down on the sidewalk, the right side of his face flush with pavement, staring way beyond his cup of little change. One of his legs and both hands were missing. They—the guy and the cup—lay motionlessly, waiting for change, together. His gut silently screamed at the busy and important pedestrians stepping around them, he and his cup; his screams made us feel ashamed for laughing with all of our body parts beautifully connected together, for walking, sometimes unhappily, for making the sidewalk that holds his face, chopped up body, and cup so dirty. The sidewalk was very dirty.

The appropriate supplicatory performance of the wai is physically impossible without two hands with two palms and ten fingers to place together, fingers elongated, pointing upwards and brought directly in front of one’s chest, nose or forehead, depending on how fervently one wishes to to supplicate. But without hands, palms, and fingers, this—among other basic daily performances salutary to life in Thailand or elsewhere—is impossible. Unlike the guy on the sidewalk, I have all my fingers, palms, and hands, and I use them to work for a magazine about coffee, tea, and ice cream, somehow.

Chiang R/Mai Revisited

I've just come back from a business trip to the north of Thailand that devolved into a week of loafing. Coddled by the hills and breezes of the North, I, once again, confronted the obvious: Working in an office, no matter what cool stuff you think you're doing, sucks. I prefer sitting there in Chiang Rai, by the road, staring into the road-hazard light spinning insanely. The light sweeps through cars' windows, illuminating private interiors and strangers' faces for a moment, affording me a sense of motion and humanity that sitting in an office does all to suck away. My enemies are few: Inertia, Routine, and Habituation.

Mercenaries

We've been nesting behind enemy lines for a week now. "The emperor is sick, weakened" says the very confused Pencil Nuts. "We make our move and take him out tomorrow." Sauces tells P.N. to shut up, reminds him that he, P.N., is a fish, that his name is Pencil Nuts for a reason, and that he, Sauces, is the ranking grunt. Moreover, if he, P.N., confuses his role in this hierarchical binary again, he, Sauces, will tear Pencil Nuts a new one, so to speak. I made an abortive attempt to console P.N., assuring him that we'd make our move in good time, that he'd do himself a whole lot of good to try to get some rest in the mean time. He didn't even look at me. To suggest one rest in this morass is to suggest the impossible. He just put his head between his legs, plugged his fingers in his ears, and started humming chromatic scales to himself, laying his consciousness to rest in a cradle of autohypnosis. 

It wasn't so much the constant threat of ambush during our most unguarded and vulnerable moments that kept us awake at night as it was the steady diet of jolt cola and absinthe Vitality Replenishers (or VRs, not to be confused with virtual reality) with which we were equipped before deployment. So, you couldn't really blame P.N. for his mild delusion: Not only was the emperor not sick, he did not need to be assassinated because he didn't actually exist. Perched a meter above the ground, our bodies and minds squatted on a felled stretch of timber, teetering. 

A small rumble emerged from the hollow of my belly. "We need to eat something," I tried to say. Only drool and squeaks came out of my mouth. Fanciful Leprosy grabbed my hand, told me to take it easy, that I shouldn't try to resist it, to expend too much energy, that the near lethal dose of Shmorsels I unknowingly ingested would be expelled in a few hours, and with it, the hallucinatory affects crippling my sense of self and occupational duties. I stood up and executed a back flip off the log, ninja kicking all the while. I did this to demonstrate both my readiness for battle and seriousness of hunger. Nonplussed, my obtuse yet comprehensible tormentor reminded me this was primarily a reconnaissance mission, so I need not ninja kick, and secondly, the terms of our contracts, by which we voluntarily agreed to comply, stipulated we'd be endowed with no rations of substantive sustenance, but that we could forage and pillage as needed or desired. Damnit! he was right. I agreed and deigned to tell him as much, but the Shmorsels, or whatever it was that had taken hold of my productive language faculties, slew my thoughts just shy of cerebellar innervation, rendering my attempts at coherent speech and, by consequence, comportment, shamefully infantile. 

I stood, observing the dragons swirling above my comrades' VR (once again, not to be confused with virtual reality) helmets, carefully considering with which weapon would be most appropriate to cut down these beasts from hell. Swirling. Swirly. I thought, "the broadsword!" But oh, shit: Though it had the advantage of range in closs proximity and high hit/swing ratio, the hand guard was flimsy, so my hand would certainly be taken as a trophy back to the mead hall and gifted as tribute to Dragacornus X, or whoever it is these gremlins bow down to. Damnit! I'll have to use the fucking sling shot. I felt impotent as I reached into my acorn pouch, grabbing a handful of the stupid nuts I thought I had ditched a long time ago when I learned Back Flip Ninja Kick. I obviously couldn't do that, BFNK, here--no, it just wouldn't suit--I'd get incinerated by the fire breath before I'd be close enough to land my deadly blow. Calming down, I took stock of the situation, resolved that I was bad ass with the sling shot, that these unidragon-fairies had nothing against my acorns and general military prowess, and that I was a beautiful animal of the Earth, whether I could verbally articulate my hunger or not. I looked down at the verdant grass and inhaled deeply, observing the ground slowly swallow a sinking world. A smile spread across my face as I remembered that my boots, although now being digested by the soil, were waterproof. 

My feet are warm.

There is a god.

The Thai-Style Pub (Part 1)

Thai pubs, or discotheques (well, that name is misleading too), are very unique to Thailand. This is a subject I was more engaged with when living in Chiang Rai, the northern most province in Thailand and biggest city therein. Nearly every weekend my esteemed colleague and I would venture into one pub or another under the moral aegis of engaging in participatory observation research for the nobler telos of potentially submitting an academic article to one of several well-known anthropology journals (working title: Houses of The Holy: The Thai-Style Pub as Locus of the Projection, Appropriation, and Reconstruction of Western-Liberal Notions of Gender, Sexual and Other Bodily Practices Within Traditional Thai Discursive Formations of the Same). As alcohol and hip-hop/house mash-ups are wont to do, however, our nobler aims for expanding academia's ken of social-scientific truths oft deteriorated into something that approximates what in some dialects of English could be described as a "shit-show." So, here I present to you my musings on the Thai pub, merely a glimpse, peering down into the mine-shaft of an academic treasure house, inexhaustible in its riches, only so that you, the reader, may take away with you a handful of (intellectual) booty.

Although there are--in Bangkok, for example--some pubs that both betray the archetype I am about to describe and approximate what Westerners commonly refer to as clubs, I'd venture to say 99.7 percent of all pubs in Thailand do not. As such, I will refer to the quintessential, ideal-type Thai-style pub as a "Thai pub" and will qualify the word appropriately should I need to employ the same word(s) to illustrate contrast or anomaly.

Thai pubs are host to one or many well-rehearsed cover bands of Thai (and occasionally, English) pop-punk, pop-ska, ska-hip-hop, and pop songs. The songs are super lame, undemanding, and repetitive, yet everybody goes fucking ape shit for them. The bands look deceivingly cool, mimicking the latest fashion and hairstyles from Japan. Up until the moment they, the band members, start to play and the singer reveals to the audience he's been thoroughly neutered of his masculinity, the band manages to deceive just about everybody in the audience into thinking their comportment and countenance suggests originality or at least passably Cool. This instance, like several others, is but one of several crystallizations of cognitive dissonance I and any perceptive westerner may experience in Thai pubs. That said, these disappointments, discomforts, confusions chain together in a surprising manner, giving way to something like a fractal that never resolves itself, a thing of ineffable complexity, and either because of or in spite of that, expresses a unique beauty.

These bands usually entertain/irritate their audience for an hour and then retire for the evening, giving way to other bands, more or less cut from the same alluvium. The intervals punctuated by these bands are the occasions in which my colleague and I tend to break from our repugnance, disdain, or whatever it is that separates us from sharing the ebullience evinced by the majority of the pub's clientele, and start to break it down real good. For the simple reason that these time intervals, some stretching to lengths of 85 minutes, are the occasion for mostly-American-but-sometimes-British-hip-hop-and-house remix sets, we boogie. For better or worse, it is also at this time that the rest of the pub's patrons experience acute symptoms of cold-feet, bodily insecurity, and, though more difficult to perceive, cultural dissociation (To what degree the latter symptom is manifested is the subject of healthy debate and contestation, one to which I invite the reader to pay comment.)

In addition to music, Thai pubs also share a common layout. Where a Westerner might expect there to be empty space reserved for cutting rug, there is a multitude of small, circular chest-high tables (waist-high for me) for supporting the bottles of whiskey, soda, and coca-cola that everybody drinks in plenty. Where in Western-style pubs, it typically occurs that one's dancing justifies one's existence on the pub's dance floor. At that of the Thai variety, it is the claim to a table that does this very crucial work of establishing a solid social footing in relation to the pub's clientele; if you can set a drink on a table, then you also have the right to dance (or stand) around it.

It is much less common to order a beer at a Thai pub than it is to share a bottle of whiskey, a bucket of ice, and some mixers with who you hope are your friends. Usually, if you and your companions don't finish the bottle, the pub will protect the bottle until the next time you or anybody with your opened-bottle-redeeming card returns to drink your booze. If I don't finish the bottle, I like to fool-heartedly dash out with it before the fleet of roaming, bottle-smuggling-patron watchers have any clue what hit them. Suckers.

Dancing, as mentioned, is always confined to an imaginary yet palpable perimeter that runs concentrically around the tables. I find this to be the most bothersome fact of Thai pubs because I, if you don't already know, need space, elbow and head room--a high ceiling to comfortably get down. The tables are unavoidable and often arranged in a way to make both the pub seem more crowded than it really is (though they do tend to get really freaking packed) and the patrons relax into the healthy, rhythmic chicken-twitching a less dispassionate scholar might confuse as dancing. Chicken-twitching at the Thai pub becomes incidental and secondary to getting drunk for men, while ladies still seem more inclined and apt to chicken-twitch. As you can see, having a table is a must. Without a table, you are a stray dog in Singapore. Second in importance to laying claim to real estate is being member to a party of friends.

Essentially, there are several self-contained parties occurring in a shared space where the event of meeting new people is legitimized and facilitated by the conjoining of these highly mobile tables; when a member of one party stumbles upon the welcoming gaze and consequent smiling and raising of glasses of a member to another party, it tacitly grants the permission to approach, introduce, and unite respective clans.

The polygonal shape of the table, usually hexagonal or pentagonal, is key to facilitating inter-group socialization. The tables are hoisted by the brethren of one clan and interlocked with the tables of a receiving clan, atoms bonding to form molecular chains of nascent, well-lubricated friendships. In this sense, we can imagine the socialscape of the Thai pub as something like a shipwreck: hundreds of disoriented passengers clinging to a limited number of life preservers, skeptical yet yearning for a sense of humanity, collective effervescence, or comprehension of love before the sea swallows them whole. One's peers, in this view, could be seen by others as essential supplies, wrapped in waterproof, buoyant containers, promising life after the cold, black night passes and they, the others and your peers, are rescued, brought aboard a rescue boat, and delivered to a place in the world of high social standing and, by consequence, material well being because you look cool when you're hanging out with a lot of people; peers, as a rule, improve one's attractiveness, so the more people in your group, the better your chances are of eliciting approving or inviting glances from the other passengers wading amidst the flotsam. The other night a girl told me I was "soooo lucky" to be friends with the people she and I recognize as my friends. What a bitch.

The merging of tables represents an elision of communal identities, and so though you may have been away at the bathroom, absentmindedly bouncing your head against the the wall to the bass emanating from the floor below, forgetting that you live in another country, that you have feet and that they dance--are dancing--there has been a complete rearrangement of the social-geography in the club, and when you return you have a new group of strangers to call friends of your own and to learn what you can of them, ask for phone numbers of people with pretty faces, and cut rug, perhaps shocking/offending those recently united. And so tenuous friendships fortify or dissolve over the next hour or however long it is before the lights turn on and you start to wonder which women you met could be biologically classified as women or socioeconomically labeled as sex workers and whether if you never found out that they were or were not these things, would it really matter? That said, you still want to ask, not even towards the ends of scoring or whatever, but strictly to see if you called it or whatever, and for the sake of advancing science. The problem is that there is no good way to ask, so out of fear and self-doubt, you steal away and rest in the comfort that you will probably never see that individual again and that that Lynchian web of disorienting siginfiers from which you just emerged is ubiquitous in Thailand and reproduced everywhere.

This might seem to suggest there are a lot of women whose genders and/or means to sustenance of which no observer could be completely certain. In fact, there are, particularly in Thai pubs. There are a lot of pubs in Thailand, everywhere, urban or otherwise, whose patrons, for the most part, comprise a similar social scape in which a significant number of women--relative to western-style or other non-Thai-style Thai pubs--are only performing as such, which is to say they were born with penises. This is a stereotype about Thailand, that there are a lot of men performing as women, which exists because it's sort of true. Fact: Thailand carries out the most sexual reassignment surgeries in the world next to Iran. Transsexuality has a long history in Thailand, one which I'm not really well-read on. It suffices simply to say that it is not a thing of the West. More interestingly is how little homosexuality is accepted, in- and outside the pub, if it does not go hand in hand with performing as the opposite, socially appropriate sex.

I pause here to catch my breath, collect my thoughts, and do the work I've been putting off all day before I write the next, more substantive part of this post. Perhaps it will be tomorrow that I venture back into the field for more research.

Stupid/Decisions

I make stupid decisions frequently: This morning I ate yogurt in the shower; a few days ago I shaved my beard down to a mustache; and last month I tried to shave my beard with yogurt. The stupidest decision I've made in recent history--like most of my decisions, stupid or not--was catalyzed by my attraction to a girl. Admittedly, what qualifies the decision as stupid or not is how things pan out with the object of attraction. In the case where things don't pan out, i.e., go the way I want them to, the decision gets filed under the classification of stupid and, to the extent that things fail to pan out according to my design, gets further sub-classified as really stupid, one of the stupider, or, in this case, the stupidest in recent history. 

The decision I made--to work as an editor for a magazine and, perhaps more tellingly, share an office with this beguiling espresso machine sales-manager--is the reason I now live in Bangkok as opposed to, say, Tokyo. The reason that decision was stupid--exceptionally stupid--has nothing to do with the fact that I live in Bangkok; Bangkok can be a fine place. It is the supidest decision I've made in recent history because I was so moved eight months ago by this one person (insipid and very conventional, as it turns out) that came flitting through a coffee shop, conducting the course of my life towards such a place that the geographical conditions would be  prime for our shared, future happiness. The awareness that this, the beguiling espresso machine sales-manager and my stupid plans for my--no, our--future, juxtaposed with the reality of the situation--no second date, a mutually coerced and experienced loathing when in the other's presence--is the reason (or at least constitutes a more-than-marginal part of the cluster o' contingencies that animates the visage commonly referred to to as a decision) I came to Bangkok makes me feel like it, no, the decision and its executor, were stupid. Very stupid.

Coffee Hangover

I come to the office on most days with a coffee hangover. This usually happens the morning after a day in which I have more than eight shots of espresso and take a can of coffee in the evening, which happens to be most days. The thing I notice most--more than the loss of motivation to do anything work related or the inability to focus on anything for more than three seconds or the synesthetic weight-gain, which is to say, lethargy--is that it requires a monumental effort to produce words, sentences: to verbally communicate to other people.  That I experience this symptom so acutely, I have affectionately dubbed the sensation of my almost daily coffee hangover The Hush. 

One day, maybe six months ago, when I was teaching English at Mae Fah Luang University, I walked to my office, thoroughly Hush-stricken, and saw a colleague of mine approaching from the other end of the hall. We had about fifty meters before we would cross the threshold after which a verbal acknowledgment of the other's existence--by way of salutation w/r/t time of day and/or perfunctory question, usually about whether the other had eaten or where the other was coming from/going to--would be incumbent upon both of us.  I suddenly regretted waking up that morning, wishing that for just one day, I would not have to utter a single disingenuous sound. 

I chewed on the words silently, preparing for the moment when I'd have to spit them out. I realized that after I spoke to him, my colleague and tormentor, I would be expected to produce many more words, phony and fluffy words, to hundreds of students, all day long. Our eyes looked around the hall (the window, our own feet) until we entered that imagined-space-in-which-mutual-verbal-acknowledgment-is-obligatory (let's call it the Dog-pit) whereupon we made eye contact, put on expressions somewhere between surprise and appreciation, and said some very inconsequential things. 

I can't remember what I said, but I do remember being unable to remember what I said immediately after I said it, and worrying, "did I actually say something or just think it? If I did say something, was it coherent? What language did I use? Did I use language or just leak phatic drool?" The realization that I was asking myself these questions begged other, more urgent questions: "Who in their right mind asks themselves whether they just said 'good morning' or whatever it was I said after they say it? Is the mind really that divorced from the body?"

This only happens when I have a coffee hangover, which is often. HOWEVER! like most withdrawal symptoms, The Hush can be squelched by imbibing at least six cups of espresso, after which one can enjoy acute benefits of caffeine, the cause of the hang over, or what I call being jazzed--the acute euphoria, verbal diarrhea, synesthetic genius of intellect and discernment, and impulse to disco that visits the coffee drinker--for a short while before the coffee hangover and its hand-maiden, The Hush, come back to haunt the caffeine addict the next day. Although I have been drinking coffee almost daily for maybe four years now, I currently work for a magazine about coffee, (well, really coffee, tea, and ice cream) which is either really convenient or unhealthy, depending on what time of day it is.

Ineluctable Beauty

This is when something grabs you by the gut and flushes your brain clean of chatter and you feel a little queazy, helpless, like your going to cry. You want to hug, kiss, or destroy, immediately, whatever it is that has seized you. This feeling can get confused with any number of feelings, like pity: when you're in 5th grade watching the 4th grade class perform Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat--the boys' faces are caked with stage-makeup, their sullen smirks distancing their selves from their characters--they watch each others' feet and bump shoulders as the music pulls them through an over-rehearsed yet still shoddily executed choreography. There, in that world, the year of 1998, in the cradle of that school auditorium, in that play, that song and dance number (Go Go Go, Joseph), in those uncoordinated shuffles and garishly painted faces, you would have experienced this thing called ineluctable beauty; a stab, a flash of the whole spectrum of experience: the pain, pleasure, injustice, serendipity, and forgetfulness we and the world cause each other, reified, exploding on stage, a frustrated paroxysm of teen-insecurity, an insidious rebellion to the circus of life that awaited you and every other student in that room.  You might not have been (or never be) able to put words to that emotion, to that experience, as you would have been thrown between other, more familiar, all-too-simplistic and misleading words that would miss the mark entirely, so you land on pity, and, surprisingly, do your best to conceal a tear that comes more from a place of confusion and exaltation than sadness.