I need a mechanic … for my consciousness, my mind, my body

It's strange to see a photo of my grandma holding me and smiling. I don't have memories of her being happy, and I don't even remember the sound of her voice. It makes me happy to see her smiling and to think of her life and what made her, her. I don't really know if she ever worked or what she did if she did. I don't know how she and my grandfather met. I spent a little more time with my grandpa, but not by much. I remember my grandmother's funeral, sort of. I think I was eight when she passed. My uncle took me to visit grandpa in Florida once. We went with his step-daughter. Grandpa liked to watch soap operas and go to McDonald's for watery coffee and meet with his old timer friends to catch up on gossip. I wonder if they liked to watch Days of Our Lives and General Hospital, also. Grandpa kept a fruit bowl on his coffee table at his Florida mobile home. My step-cousin ate all of the fruit one day, mostly consisting of bananas. Grandpa was quick to let me know this was why she was so fat and that she was a spoiled brat. 

So, in my last post, I tried being cheery and, check, that’s done. Did that. My last entry will likely be my only attempt at trying to feign a good mood and cheerful disposition, for it is an empty and bankrupt existence that I toil with. I hear no words. I feel no feelings. All of the dopamine bursts are transactional, sans a few exchanges with friends and my dogs and family that keep me going, I guess. I can come alive with distraction. It happens, and then it’s over, and the emptiness returns like a void I rest in as I hope for no more distractions.

Yesterday, as I lay in bed not wanting to get up, I felt what was like a chisel cracking my skull. My head, with a sharp pain, just split. I reached for my ibuprofen and took two. I lay back down. I don’t want the sun to come up and the world to be bright out. It’s raining, and I like the sound, the cool breeze, and the dim light. I hope it rains forever. 

Still, I know I have so much to do, but all ambition has left me, and I don’t feel much of anything. I have moments of awakeness and times when I’m asleep. I prefer the times I’m asleep, frankly. I don’t even care that “awakeness” isn’t a word. Or, wasn’t a word because it is now. In my grumpy lexicon, at least. 

My own smell repulses me. Yet, I’m so tired I don’t want to shower. Where before I was obsessed with moisturizing daily, I now don’t want to take the time. And, why? What else do I have to do that is so important? A lot of nothing. I lather up my hair in shampoo and use that as my soap, rinse off and get out, get dressed, and go back to bed or lie in my hammock or zombie walk around the house or take the dogs for a walk while listening to PBS news, music, or a podcast. But I will say, my shampoo, soap, and some lotions also smell repulsive to me. I have four different deodorants because they were all just bad. This pickiness isn’t limited to smells, however. I currently have three drinks made because I just can’t dial it in. I abstain for a while, crave something, make it, and set it aside.

Because of my lack of self-motivation right now, I need constant stimulation in my waking hours. But why? What will happen if I’m left alone with my thoughts? It is the idea that nothing will happen, nothing good or bad or forward or anywhere, that discourages me from it. I’m tired of trying. If I switch my mindset to “doing”, it makes no difference.

Yesterday, I had a house showing and took the dogs to a friend’s house. I brought over donuts out of gratitude and a sweet tooth. We sat outside while the dogs ran and played, and chewed on each other’s faces. It was a bit muddy, and I got some mud on my legs as one of the dogs jumped up on me, asking for pets while slobbering all over my hands at the same time, only to equally as decisively jump down and away and get back to the game of chase. This game of chase makes my heart very happy, and I look on with joy as we continue our chat.

My friend got a new bike to commute to work. A Surly Skid Loader e-bike. It has fenders and lights and a rack and is very industrial looking. 

“It’s gonna change my life!” He says referring to the good mood riding his bike to work and back puts him in. “I’m going to have to think about this rain this week,” he says.

“Well, like I told you, when I used to ride to work, I’d put my bike on the bus sometimes when it rained, only to take it off again and just ride in the rain because I’d beat it. I’d beat traffic riding my bike,” I said.

“Yea, these fenders are great. Should keep me pretty clean. This skirt in front I got to mostly protect this part here,” he says as he taps the motor with his foot.

“Is it a Bosch?” I ask.

“Yep,” he says.

He likes to say, “You were a monster,” when he talks about the years I spent bike commuting up and down the hill to and from work and all around town. Sometimes I’d ride in over a hundred degrees. 107 I think was the hottest. Hot enough for me to take note of and feel a sense of pride that it didn’t bother me. But I was acclimated back then. Daily riding will do that. 

Sometimes I rode a carbon frame road bike, but I also rode a steel frame single-speed with a rack and pannier, as well as an aluminum frame adventure bike with a rack and pannier. Each type of bike sort of represents different years I spent commuting. I bought the single-speed with the rack because I was tired of wearing a backpack with the road bike. It became my main commuter. Then, I got a job where I’d have to adjust my speed all the time because I was riding with students and would have to take a guard position and monitor them constantly, so I bought a bike with gears and a rack that was more utilitarian. I mourn the recent sale of my single-speed. It is a Fairdale, and, although they aren’t made in the States anymore, I was still happy to have a bike whose brand originated in Austin, Texas.

“I want to be a strong person again,” I say. “I’m worried I’ll never be a strong person again.”

He told me he could never do what I did commuting without electric assist and reminded me I was a monster then, again. I tell him, of course, he could. It just takes training. Doing it over and over again, you get used to it. 

As I say this, I am reminded of my slow decline as I’ve lived in this city of broken glass. I’m reminded of how I slowly rode less and less. I’m reminded of how I stopped running altogether. I’m reminded of how once I passed everyone going uphill on my ss steel, but then a year later struggled to get up hill on my carbon road bike while watching a real monster casually pedal farther and farther away.

It happens when you’re not looking, I think. It happens, and you wonder how it happened. It happens, and I think I will never get it back. And, I might never get it back because I don’t want to. I am so unenamored. I am so apathetic. I am uninspired, careless, angry, disappointed, frustrated, tired, pissed off, uninterested, and unimpressed. 

I watched a video of myself teaching a bootcamp class from about nine years ago. I had someone record it because I was doing 22 Kill, which is 22 push-ups for 22 days, and you get 22 new people to do it in that time to spread military PTSD and suicide awareness. During my 22 days, I and sometimes friends and students had a lot of “fun” coming up with a variety of different kinds of push-ups or doing them in different locations, like in front of Wrigley Field. Who knew there were so many different kinds of push-ups?! Standard push-ups, chaturanga push-ups, plyometric (clap) push-ups, “Spiderman” push-ups, diamond push-ups, decline push-ups, pike push-ups, one-armed push-ups, X push-ups, divebomber push-ups, and others.

I was surrounded by people who challenged me from about 2008 to 2017. It was the best time in my life. Not only physically, but mentally. I loved people who read books and talked to me about books and turned me on to new ideas. I loved teaching all the art and humanities classes at the nonprofits, historical society, and the community education department of the college. If I could’ve taken that part out of the reality of the town I lived in and just existed there in that happy spot, I might never have left. But the reason for my wanting to leave goes back to my childhood, and, frankly, I didn’t see the change I needed to see, much less did it seem my being the change helped spread a positive cultural shift toward humanitarianism, random acts of kindness, social justice, freedom of expression, or acceptance of people’s differences. 

I would accept others despite their differences, yet I would be seen as and called “unpatriotic.” I would be reminded that “we speak English in this country” because I offered a few dozen language and cultural classes and events in my studio. One conservative lady stood up in a gathering and said I stood for ‘drug culture’, whatever that means. Ironically, this lady ran a weird little newspaper that had the word ‘positively’ in its title, but there was nothing really ‘positive’ about her. The mayor’s son had to come over to me and reassure me that her outburst was more about her than me and that someone close to her had a drug problem. She was quick to judge me, but felt no need to actually get to know me.

An older, balding farmer man read a letter out loud at an arts meeting at the Chamber and said, basically, our youth would become brainwashed. Because Robert Mapplethorpe was gay and died of AIDS, we’d be promoting homosexuality by promoting the arts in our town, which isn’t Christian. 

It’s funny to me now how naive I was. I believed that once everyone had ample opportunities to see how beautiful and diverse the world was through our educational events and classes, that anyone who harbored hate and misunderstanding in their heart would surely cease to be prejudiced and discriminatory.

Once angsty teens and adults alike could show their art and feely express themselves, a sense of calm would wash over them for being heard, and the audiences would listen to their identification of injustice in the world, and the world would change.

How very wrong I was.

But my desire to leave what I perceived as a veneer of goodness that was this town, named “best place to raise children,” began in my childhood. As was my desire to right what I felt were wrongs or just plain old ignorance. Nothing more than great annoyances, I was often called “that Chinese kid” or asked if I was Mexican. Many times, I would be called “exotic”. Many times, people asserted to me that the Chinese and Japanese languages were the same, as were the cultures. It was tiring. I felt sad also that my heritage was not represented, and if someone did put Asian people in film or television, it was, indeed, Chinese. Or worse, white people dressed up to be Chinese. People would tell me Mandarin was the language to learn because it is the most spoken language in the world, not citing that it is due to being the largest population. Finding access to a language I longed to learn was nearly impossible, and my mom wasn’t much help since she wanted me to just blend in, and she had really not developed a habit of speaking to me in Japanese. She didn’t really teach me much intentionally, actually, despite her many talents, knowledge, and perfectionism. 

Still, the moment I turned on my fair town is really the result of one meeting with my middle school counselor.

I sat and waited for my turn in the hall, having finally mustered up the courage to tell someone about my dad. My dad, after all, was hurting me. He was hurting my mom. It was complicated because I loved him and was inspired by him. But he was a very damaged man, and he had no qualms with violence, shouting, belittling, or even death. I remember being about five when my mom was rather upset. I’m not sure she should have told me, but she said he had taken a bag of kittens to the river to kill them. How did I miss this fight? Surely, she would have fought to save them or tried to stop him? She said it wasn’t the first time. He had done this with puppies before, too. That they’re better off and would have starved. 

Left: Unknown man; Middle: Dad; Right: Uncle Joe Smith, a Navy man who also married a Japanese woman, whom I adored, Katie Smith. Location: Alligator Alley, Florida most likely

My dad was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1931in the Englewood neighborhood. Some might say that was enough to give a person thick skin. 63rd and Ashland was a mostly German, Irish, and Swedish population back then, and the residents worked at the stockyards, the railroad, like my grandfather did, and the transit authority. This was also the period of the great depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939. Manufacturing, the city’s main staple, was severely cut, and there was massive unemployment. “Hobolands” were created in many of the open spaces. 

Gangsters were very real, including the “Chicago Outfit”, an Italian American crime family, founded by Big Jim Colosimo and run by Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and others. They situated themselves on the South Side and were also known as the “South Side Gang”, “The Chicago Mob”, the “Organization”, and the “Chicago Mafia”. They ran illegal booze in the 1920’s until prohibition ended in 1933, but continued to run alcohol distribution and use black hand tactics to control politicians, unions, prostitution, gambling, loansharking operations, and entertainment. 

Needless to say, it might have been a rough spot to grow up. 

I never really wanted to know much about Al Capone or the Chicago Mob due to all the largely unspoken hype about it. Al Capone would take a baseball bat to a person’s head without a second thought, and that was pretty much all I needed to know about that.

My grandparents were pretty unforgiving, also. They subscribed to the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ edict and came from the Old World. They sort of remind me of the nursery rhyme Jack Sprat. My grandmother was a sort of rectangular woman, like a refrigerator, often with a full apron that tied around her waist, typical of older women back then, and just barely giving her waist some shape. Her hair was always done, and she always had on a dress, stockings, and a scowl. 

My grandfather was a tallish and thin man who liked to wear slacks and a button-down shirt always tucked in, and he always had a belt and shiny shoes. She was often found in the kitchen, complaining. He was often found in his chair reading a paper, silent.

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