Thinks

Cal wasn't ever any good at goodbyes.

He just grins awkwardly, tosses some half-baked cliche over his shoulder, and scoots away as quickly as he can. Goodbyes are painful, no matter how long the ensuing absence.

Deep inside, he thinks that maybe there is a chance that this will be the last goodbye, that something might go terribly wrong.

He also thinks that maybe he reads the paper a little too much.

But he knows that there are infinitely more things that could go wrong than the things that needed to go right.

Cal thinks about Captain Ed Murphy and his law.

He wonders what would happen if he died. How many people had he forgotten to kiss goodbye? Oops.

In his mind, Cal remembers that goodbyes are always permanent because time doesn't stop changing people just because they've gone away, and since they're away and time passes, they change, but you're not there to see it, so the next time you see them, no matter how long it's been, they're not the same people you said goodbye to.

Those people are dead.

Cal wonders how many times he's died.

Sometimes, he thinks he's always dying.

He's too busy dying to live.

How about that?

I'm Not A Writer

When I was in the sixth grade, I wrote a twenty-two-page-long story about a lost prince named Damian who reclaims his (dead) father's throne. The whole shebang took place in the land of Tithaus, a place of unrest and lots of monologue-prone people with swords and cloaks.

Last winter break, I wrote a gajillion-page-long (help me out here, Tonya) story about a dude named Saul who starts a revolution in the middle of a snowy winter and then ends up killing himself. Sort of.

Last summer, I wrote a twenty-page-long story about some guy who runs around in the woods setting things on fire before (unfortunately) setting himself on fire.

I'm sure that all of these are related somehow.

The influence of The Lord of the Rings is pretty obvious. I am forever stuck in a land of bows and arrows (and sometimes magic). I once tried writing about some guy in the Army. That one made it to about thirty pages before dying an abrupt death of over-complicated plot.

The thing is, I don't think I'm a writer anymore. A writer... well, writes. I haven't written a piece of fiction I've liked since the sixth grade, and I don't really even think that counts anymore. Blogging isn't writing so much as it is typing whatever comes to mind and hoping that it makes sense. Essay writing isn't writing so much as it is gritting my teeth and plowing through structural criticism and passive voice. I feel like writing should be both spontaneous and critical. Right now, mine is neither.

I haven't stopped dreaming, though. Definitely not in the literal sense. I get up early because I can't go back to sleep and find myself staring at a blank piece of paper, which was once inviting but now is nothing more than processed wood.

In a sense, I'm scared to stop blogging because then I'd really be writing absolutely nothing. Days and days would pass without words. Weeks, maybe. That's truly terrifying. So for now, I suppose, this blog will go on.

How it will go on is an entirely different matter.

The Presidential Placemat

I (once again) have packed far too early and am sitting here with absolutely nothing substantive with which to entertain myself. I guess I'll just talk about The Presidential Placemat.

I have no idea where my mother found the many strange (but all somehow educational) placemats of my childhood that we still have stuffed into our pantry. They all miraculously appeared and disappeared beneath our breakfasts every morning, gleaming dully under the yellowed kitchen table plastic in the light of the $25 Tiffany lamp. Every bleary-eyed morning was spent staring sightlessly at these placemats as they paraded by under our eggs and sausages. There was one with a map of the United States plastered on one side in truly alarming colors. Little black dashes took the place of the state names. Flip it over and little black dashes replaced the capital names.

Our placemats appeared to be on permanent rotation until one day, I noticed that my placemat hadn't changed in several weeks. I stared. Forty-two white dudes stared back with varying amounts of animosity.

Such was the advent of The Presidential Placemat.

Every morning at breakfast, I'd stare at the presidents. I decided that William Henry Harrison did look rather frail. Taft did look large enough to get stuck in a bathtub. I learned every president's first, middle, and last name. After a while, though, the beady eyes began to creep me out. One day, I took the placemat and flipped it over. Over the years, I've read every little box at least a dozen times during tense meals at the kitchen table.

Off the top of my head, I remember that Franklin Pierce was responsible for Matthew C. Perry's trip to Japan, that Buchanan was the only unmarried president (interesting, that), and that there is a punctuation error in the little box talking about John Quincy Adams that has never failed to darken my foul mood.

I didn't realize how much of that information I'd somehow assimilated through this strange form of breakfast hypnopaedia until I took AP U.S. History during my junior year in high school. Some things I just knew. Most of it was really strange, useless information. Like how short James Madison was. But others were important. Whenever people think about presidential assassination, they think about Lincoln. Or JFK.

Were Garfield and McKinley so unimportant?

I thought it was common knowledge. Apparently not. The Presidential Placemat hurled me into a strange world of unconscious knowledge from unconscious learning. Of course Benjamin Harrison was William Henry Harrison's grandson. Of course John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826. It all made sense.

Strangely enough, The Presidential Placemat made me realize that learning was everything all the time. Whether unconscious or not, some part of whatever it is that I'm doing ends up sticking in my head for better or for worse. That's both exhilarating and terrifying.

The Presidential Placemat is in my dorm room, resting up against my bookshelf. I'm not entirely sure why I asked my mother to bring it to me, but it's here to stay. It's a sort of childhood relic. Old, familiar, comfortable. I still leave the forty-two white dudes face down, though. I can't stand the accusation.

My Life as a Fish Murderer

Homicidal tendencies manifested themselves early on in my childhood.

In other words, I was a fish murderer.

Twin cichlids christened Long Beach and Los Angeles by my then-five-year-old brother were the very first non-human members of the Chen household. Before my bloody entrance into this world, Long Beach and Los Angeles laid a crop of eggs. When the time came, Long Beach and Los Angeles committed a most gruesome infanticide of massive proportions, devouring all of their young within moments of their hatching.

And so it was, that on a dark and stormy night marked by rolling thunder and silently screaming fish babies, I made my grand entrance into this world. This did not bode well for my relations with the rest of this earth’s fauna.

Long Beach died soon after my birth (another macabre indication of my murderous tendencies), so I was raised alongside Los Angeles, who by this time was getting on in fish years. I ran over to the fish tank every day after my brother finished playing piano in order to watch him tap fish food into the lonely fish tank. I enjoyed sniffing the fish food, the sharp tangy scent reaching far beyond my olfactory bulb to my amygdala, setting off all sorts of primal instincts, the least of which involved throwing myself onto the floor and thrashing about like a beached whale. I became part fish.

As time passed, we determined that Los Angeles was lonely and that we should present unto him a worthy companion. My practical father decided on a garbage fish. The moment this first garbage fish latched onto the clear walls of the tank and I saw it sucking away algae, I knew that it had to go. I named him Oscar.

Los Angeles clearly shared my opinions on this new occupant of the tank and attacked it with a ferocity the world had not seen since the Infanticide of 1995. When I found Oscar floating belly up a few weeks later, I knew that we had been successful.

A string of garbage fish followed, all of them christened Oscar. They all met the same fate and toilet-flush funeral.

Los Angeles was now pushing thirteen human years and probably sixty million billion fish years, but in no way was his reign of The Tank questionable. My father decided that bringing in more cichlids would rein in this fiery temper. He was, unfortunately, a little too correct.

He took my teenaged brother and me to the tropical fish store one more time, and we each picked out a brightly-colored fish. Mine had a purple head and a yellow tail. I named him (or her—I really had no idea) Laker and congratulated myself on my clever word play. My brother picked the biggest, meanest fish out of the tank and named it Tangy after its brilliant orange color. I held the fish during the car ride back home, plastic bag pooling on my lap as Tangy and Laker twitched around.

We released them with two matching plops into the fuzzy, algae-polluted world of Los Angeles and waited.

Tangy dove straight for Los Angeles, mouth wide open.

What the hell? Los Angeles thought, racing to greet this rambunctious upstart, speed by no means diminished by age.

What followed was a battle of epic aqueous proportions. Round and round they circled, with Laker hovering uncertainly under some plastic seaweed. Once, he stumbled into Tangy’s path, and a sharp nip sent him spinning. The tangle of washed-out yellow and flashing orange continued, and even when my brother left the tank for some more violent game console entertainment, I remained on my knees, nose pressed to the glass, eyes wide.

Ultimately, this was not a battle decided that day. Or the day after that. Or even in the weeks or months that followed. I felt like I was in the Coliseum watching my noble gladiator rise to meet the challenge of a young, fresh-faced warrior from the countryside. I was very much entertained, yet a knot of worry settled itself in my stomach. Was there a chance I could lose?

No. Never.

Laker was the first to go, floating belly-up one morning as I came down for breakfast. I think I may have cried. I was twelve years old.

That left the two survivors a battle to the death.

Each day when my brother would feed them, I’d watch and try to judge who had the upper hand. It was never clear, both pairs of fins pumping madly, mouths equally quick in their darting motions.

In the end, the result was determined beyond the physical abilities of my two fighting cocks. The bulb on the tank light fizzled out one night, and I awoke the next morning to find a pale yellow smudge floating motionless in the plastic shrubbery, fins rigid, eyes wide and unseeing. I refused to believe that it was possible, but the very much alive orange streak that darted by, tail rippling tauntingly in the invisible current, confirmed my worst fears.

Los Angeles had indeed been frozen to death, and down the toilet he went to be washed out with the rest of the city’s filth.

I vehemently refused my father’s offer to replace Los Angeles. Nothing could replace Los Angeles. The stubborn old fish had lived to be older than I was. Nothing would ever beat that. Every time I finished playing piano now, I glared daggers at Tangy, the flaming orange fish from the burning pits of hell. I started trying to starve the darn thing out, shaking out only a few pieces of fish food into the tank every day, but that only made it meaner, made those hideous eyes bulge even farther out of that detestable skull.

Tangy stubbornly remained our only pet for the next year or so while I schemed away. I pretended that the orange salmon my mother cooked every month was the baked body of the meanest fish ever to swim the earth. I ruthlessly tapped the plastic sides of the tank, taking a sadistic pleasure in the frenzy of the orange devil. I had dreams about squeezing the life from the slimy thing’s lungs.

Then one day, I figured it out. The perfect murder. It was in the middle of a cold and hard January, long after Christmas had passed, but not so long that the ghosts of a cheerful time didn’t lurk around the shrouds of the past, flaunting the passage of time. My late-onset homicidal inner Scrooge snuck to the fish tank one night with only the light of the tank to guide me through the tangle of the living room couches.

I glared at the orange fish. It glared right back.

You’ve got no idea what you’ve got coming for you. I thought.

Bring it on. It replied.

I reached up slowly, slowly, slowly.

And snapped off the light.

I made my way through the darkness back to my room easily, as if guided by a familiar current.

Pictures after the jump: