my name is carpenter
I hardly ever wear overalls, but
construction sites follow me around
I keep extra safety goggles in my purse
and don’t get to town much, because
you can dress a belt-sander up
but you can’t take it anywhere
if my name were rich
I’d still wear work pants, but
I’d ditch the hard hat
an armoured car service
would drive me into town
I’d be a hit at the cash & carry
I’d be a star at the solid gold bar
I’d sing double platinum hits
(happy birthday john richey)
. . . . .
There is no first class. We board all at once.
The forward toilet abuts the cockpit and is unisex.
13D is an isle seat, no matter what 13E and F say.
The faux-leather grey seats look just like in the commercials.
With a television monitor mounted in the back of every one of them.
It’s not like in the old days, when the in-flight film was free.
The headphones cost one dollar, three dollars for the nice ones.
And what you get is satellite TV. What you get is commercials.
You can’t turn the monitor off. It flies with you, inches from your face.
The default screen is a MapQuest map © 2003. Place names haven’t changed.
Fin Flon has not flip-flopped. Grand Prairie has not shrunk to Petite Prairie.
A white and windowless airplane icon pixel-pushes across the MapQest map.
Left wing grazing the 49th parallel, body long as the width of southern Manitoba.
Our fuselage overshadows Brandon, sets Swift River in its sights.
We cruse at 38,486 feet. Everything is downhill after that.
In Montreal, before take off, the MapQuest map said we sat at 36 feet.
And for a while I thought that’s how high the seats were off the ground.
We arrived in Calgary earlier than I expected.
The city met us at the airport at 3740 feet.
Now that’s first class.
. . . . .
The fastest taxi driver sped through the earliest morning rain listening to the quietest FM radio play the Frenchest jazz chanteuse singing her brokenest heart out. Fastest, earliest, quietest, Frenchest, brokenest.
I arrived at the airport so early that I miss-read my boarding pass, just to kill time. Gate A 49 is not the same as Gate A 4 – 9, and although there were plenty of places to buy a cup of earliest morning Frenchest coffee in the Gate 4, subset 9 area, there was no Gate 4, subset 9. There were no places to buy coffee, Frenchest or otherwise, at Gate A 49, 50 or 51.
In the coffee-less under-construction wing of the earliest morning airport, Saint Germaine played softest moaning and groaning and all alone-ing downest-tempo beats. The newest toilets were motion-sensitive. The cleanest sinks were motion-insensitive. I washed my hands of them.
Gate 49 was not the quietest place to wait, not even in the earliest morning. An orange T-shirted green-tattooed not large but barrel-chest bleach-blond man paced, board of waiting to board. No one left baggage unattended. There were no suspicious packages to report. It was a domesticated flight.
. . . . .
Last night I slept more in total than I have in the past week combined. I don’t remember what I dreamed in these red white and royal blue hotel room walls, but I woke up with orange on the mind, donned my orange hoodie and hiked over to MOCCA to bask in my golden ember walls. Today I learned all about how to get things mounted on foam core. I learned, for example, that foam core comes in black. News to me.
Lunch today was a roti larger than my head. It took me three sittings to finish it, but finish it I did. It entirely reorganized my sinuses, which were discombobulated in the first place. My head cold has progressed to the weepy wacky headache phase, not conducive to eating out in hipster joints. Hipster joints abound in this neck of the west end woods. I hunted down my dinner at the Price Chopper I’ve been hearing so much about out my hotel room window. No great shakes in there, but the prices were indeed chopped. I am enjoying the reclusive living-in-a-hotel-room incommunicado persona, maybe a little too much.
Tomorrow: thirty-one two and one-eighth-inch by two and three-quarter-inch foam core mounted panels meet the laser level. Until then, level headed dreams.
. . . . .
Three years and a day after the second American invasion of Iraq and I’m still not shocked, still not awed. I knew it. We all knew it, though these days I’m less and less sure whom I mean when I say we.
“I told you so” being an insufficient response to this anniversary, and in an effort to be constructive, I recommend these books, both of which provide profound historical insight into the predictable patterns of America’s present predicament.
Feeling an ominous foreshadowing of the months leading up to the invasion I read Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, The First Complete Account of Vietnam at War (NY: Viking, 1983). Karnow was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam for two decades beginning in 1959 while the French were in Indochina. Here’s but one salient fact culled from Karnow’s brilliantly written 670 pages:
“During the thirteenth century, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan invaded Vietnam, three times, pushing south to control the spice routes of the Indonesian archipelago. The Vietnamese, commanded by the illustrious Tran Hung Dao, repulsed each offensive. Like outnumbered Vietnamese officers before and since, he relied on mobile methods of warfare, abandoning the cities, avoiding frontal attacks. and harassing his enemies until, confused and exhausted, they were ripe for final attack. In the last great battle, which took place in the Red River valley in 1287, the Vietnamese routed three hundred thousand Mongol troops. In a victory poem, Vietnamese general affirmed that ‘this ancient land shall liver forever.’ Seven centuries later, the Vietminh commander Vo Nguyn Giap evoked Tran Hung Doa’s memory as he launched an operation against the French in the same area.” (101)
America doesn’t do much research into the history of the nations it invades. Remember that surreal scene in Apocalypse Now where the American soldiers have dinner at the French colonist’s house? America would also do well to consider the failure-rates of previous invaders. In preparation for the invasion of Iraq a bit of reading up on the British Empire in the Middle East would have been wise.
I am quite sure that Donald Rumsfeld has read Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. All those military guys have to at some point. But Rumsfeld is old and America is young and neither is paying attention to patterns of history. Read the entire eight volumes of The Decline and Fall replacing the word Rome with the word America and tell me how many more years we are going to be marking this anniversary. Yes, I mean “we”. Here are but a few passages:
“Against internal enemies, whose desperate insurrections had more than once reduced the republic to the brink of destruction, the most severe regulations and the most cruel treatment seemed almost justified by the great law of self-preservation.” (63) [Read: Homeland Security]
“The long peace and uniform government of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated… [The Citizens] received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army… and sank into the languid indifference of private life.” (82) [Read: Complacency]
“The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.” (621) [Read: The bigger they are, the harder they fall]
“As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise of scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” (622) [Read: The rise of the religions right]
. . . . .
It’s International Women’s Day today.
I’m a woman every day, and try to be
as international as possible, budget permitting.
It’s the Chinese Year of the Dog.
My dog is a dog every dog year, though
the Year of the Dog doesn’t last seven years.
Even when Black History Month is over
black history keeps on happening,
at least it has in the past.
Now we’re in Pisces.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Some of my best friends are Pisces.
Soon it will be Passover,
which doesn’t happen around Easter.
It’s the other way around.
When was the Year of the Child?
I hope I missed it. I had about eight years
as a child, and that was too many.
I think it’s a sign of progress that,
though I feel in need of a holiday,
I could live without this one.
. . . . .
At our house
every day is
the year of the dog.
. . . . .
Oh, she said.
God, she thought.
Why, she wondered.
Me, she concluded.
. . . . .
Recently my résumé was invited out to dinner
and graciously extended the invitation to me.
In that case, our hosts said, miffed,
please also bring a hot side dish.
My résumé roasted, carved and consumed,
I was left to pay my own cab fare home.
. . . . .
Francis Bacon, Essays, Of Travel (1625)
“He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be such a one that hath the language, and hath been in the country before; whereby he may be able to tell them what things are worthy to be seen, in the country where they go; what acquaintances they are to seek; what exercises, or discipline, the place yieldeth. For else, young men shall go hooded, and look abroad little.”
Anne Carson, The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide, 199?
[Excerpts]
I.
By this time tomorrow I will be a man of Rome.
VII.
Who I am doesn’t matter.
As you see me
fighting to survive,
fighting to be esteemed and honoured
(so that my past vanishes),
you will dismiss me as nothing terrific.
Fair enough,
but there is one thing about me:
I can take you to Anna Xenia.
VIII.
She is a citizen of the ancient republic,
historian of its wars
and ravishing
in
her
armour.
IX.
Now although I hate to travel
I go a lot of places
and have noted
certain recurrent phenomena.
A journey, for example,
begins with a voice
calling your name out
behind you.
This seems a convenient arrangement.
How else would you know it’s time to go?
[…]
Anna Xenia has studied at Oxford.
Maybe
she can explain
some of this to me.
XI.
What is the holiness of the citizen?
It is to open
a day
to a stranger,
who has no day
of his own.
XIV.
There is a wonderful lot of talk in Anna Xenia.
She cocks her head like Cicero
and pretends
I am someone talking back.
Good afternoon.
I am well thanks how are you?
XV.
From deep within
my traveller’s clothes
I watch these conversations take place.
XXII.
What is the holiness of the stranger?
He has none.
XXIV.
A stranger is poor, voracious, and turbulent.
He comes
from nowhere in particular
and pushes prices up.
His method of knowing something
is to eat it.
XXXIII.
Rome collapsed when Alaric ran out the dawn side.
XXXIV.
A stranger is someone who comes on the wrong day.
XL.
A stranger is someone desperate for conversation.
Then why is it I never have anything to say?
We perch in our armour
at the kitchen table.
XLIV.
A stranger is someone
who sits
very still at the kitchen table,
looks down at his knuckles,
thinks someday we will laugh about this,
doesn’t believe it.
LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?
It is
to master death.
Anne Carson, The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide
excerpted from Pequod.
. . . . .