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Category Archives for: Ancedote

The Dean (first published in Literary Yard)

08 April 2022 by Rey Armenteros

Listen to the details of this carefully to get my point. I was walking into a college office with a resume in my hand. I had no appointment. I was just dropping off a resume. My chair at another college told me it was better to drop these things off in person rather than send them off without a face. It was good advice, so I made the necessary copies and went from school to school. I asked the front desk lady for the dean of the art department at one college. I told her I had no appointment because I was just dropping off a resume in order to be included into the adjunct pool of part-time instructors, but if he had the time, I’d love to talk to him for a minute.

The lady went to check.

This man might not remember me, but I had met him during a job fair, where he seemed enthused by my qualifications and he asked to email him a resume. I did, and I never heard from him again. I figured he was busy. That was a year ago.

When the lady came back, she went into another office to talk to another woman. They both came out and asked me to wait a second. When the first one returned, she asked that I go in but that he only had a minute. I walked in and greeted him, telling him I had met him in a job fair a year ago when they were looking for instructors for their off-campus classes.

He went around the desk and closed the door, and he informed me that on an official level, he was not supposed to be receiving me. “This is against the regulations of the school, but go ahead, you can have your say, but just to be clear, this never happened.”

Suddenly, I felt like I was in the wrong place. I was led through the wrong door. In the back of my head, I was thinking that this was a school with severe rules if it were that stringent about the dean even talking to an instructor simply pounding the pavement. Again, he wanted to make sure that I knew that he had no information about my application as of yet; that particular stack of paperwork was going to be handled by the Committee.

At that moment, I felt he was placing my face, and though I could tell he found me familiar, he was confusing me with somebody else.

It was clear that it was a misunderstanding, and when I told him I was not one of the candidates for the tenure-track position, he said, “Oh,” and he readjusted himself and told me he had a few minutes to talk to me, but he was just as stiff as he had been when he thought I was a professorial candidate looking to get an edge on his application.

In human relations throughout the world, there is a specific face each of us gives to the public, and it is that thing that serves as an introduction to who we want to show we are. I don’t know what the dean saw that day, but it was not the face I was granting him. I was presenting the diligent, friendly adjunct who was making the rounds to see if any classes opened up for a part-timer, and he saw an unsavory, over-determined candidate using every social hook, grip, and hold in the book to get his favor to hop across the table.

The extra turn this had was that now that the dean had inadvertently shown me that he was willing to give access to somebody who was technically breaking the rules, he was now aware that “this never happened” was helping me form whatever opinions I might now be having of him after the fact. His mask had also been compromised.

We were looking at each other, each holding unpleasant thoughts about this spur of the moment meeting, staring each other down like they do in the action movies before they rise with a gun in each hand to perform the ballet of death and riddle the room with bullet holes. A self-destructive moment, albeit completely involuntary. I got up and shook his hand, thanking him, walking back to the car, wondering about my prospects, and concluding the obvious.

 

— Rey Armenteros

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One-Use Carte Blanch

01 August 2021 by Rey Armenteros

I was put in a situation when I had to use the white card. It was my ace in the event that anything happened. The semester was about to begin. My vacation was practically over, and I had to start thinking about getting things ready for the beginning of Spring 2021. Checking work emails, I was reminded of another email from last month. I was sure I had responded to it, but when I checked, I started to get that cold feeling when something important had been overlooked, and the guilty party was me.

I wrote the store representative I had had to respond to, mentioning to him that I thought I had given him my response, but I couldn’t find it in my emails anywhere. When I got his answer, my fears were confirmed. And because of my negligence, it was going to negatively impact the upcoming semester. I sat there, feeling like the monumental jackass that I was.

I thought about it for several minutes. I felt like I had to use that card now available to most of us. It was a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was going to tell him that I failed to respond to him because our household had been stricken by Covid 19. After carefully writing a well-balanced message, I sent my email to him and thought about what I had just done.

I don’t think it’s anybody’s business that we had to go through out trying times, but this was my job, and I had to give the store a sensible reason while I was pleading with them to work with me, even at so late a time. While the fact remained that I was overwhelmed last month with the state of our household, I didn’t want to cheapen the experience by providing it as an excuse for something I had failed to do. But what better excuse in these trying times?

When he wrote me back, the representative offered his sympathy, and he said he was going to try his utmost to get something done for me. He had just had two elderly family members go through Covid, and it was a very scary episode indeed. He did understand my situation, and then he explained why they could not fulfill the orders at the drop of a hat, giving me a brief explanation of the process of moving stock. They were going to do their best to get mine fulfilled.

I should have expected it, but I guess I didn’t see it coming. It started feeling like moves on a board. Though I love games, I always overlooked the likelihood that the person on the other side of the board possessed the same key piece I had just used. I was not too surprised when he pulled out the same card, making my monumental trials just max normal.

The only response at this juncture was to gush with gratitude, which I did, after offering my sympathy. But looking back on the whole misadventure of not having everything fall apart when we were overwhelmed with our circumstances, I don’t know how it could have played out any other way. I know it was my fault I didn’t respond to that one email, but I was able to do so many other duties without mishap even under the circumstances. It was like one of those bad video games from the 1980s when the game just kept throwing stuff at you before it took your third life and then “Game Over.” I did pretty well if only one thing slipped past me.

I got more emails after that. And it turned out they were going to be able to help me. Again, I gushed and told the representative and the other person involved with my emergency that they were awesome. I actually wrote a lengthy email about my gratitude, and I was sincere because they really pulled my fat out of the fire. But I got no response to this last message. I now chalk it up to their being so busy, with the semester starting and all, but I couldn’t help my initial reaction, when I sat there thinking that the only type of person who uses that card is a tremendous jackass.

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Down to the Judges (first published in Northwest Indiana Literary Journal)

06 December 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I tell people I was there, watching the fight. The massive screen was blaring through the windows, past the cheers inside. It was a triple event. I was at a birthday party that happened to be on Mexican Independence Day, and that night was the high-profile bout on pay-per-view. My neighbor had just installed the pool, and he was living it up this birthday, granting this pool party for all his close associates and loved ones. I was meeting more of his family members than I had met at the last party, and we danced to mariachis celebrating his birthday and the birth of Mexico as a modern nation. It was really overwhelming, and I was there.

Then it was time for the rematch! I stayed in the pool area with a couple of others while everybody else went inside for the main event. I could see them through the sliding glass door screaming at the set. My neighbor’s son and I were having a deep conversation about life and his time in Mexico. He was talking about his long journey, when his father was filling out the paperwork to bring him to the US. We were talking about life and the rules you had to follow in life and how oftentimes the very laws that are crucial to our lives come down to paid professionals that either know your case or don’t. Holy shit! this was sobering me up even with all the hollering in the background.

So, I was technically in the patio, and I did not see a single jab or bodyblow. I could see the video colors of the screen flashing through the silhouettes of the spectators, and about everybody there swore I watched the rematch, as they were coming out once the fight was over, hooting and lauding the unexpected results. It went the full twelve rounds. It had gone down to the judges and their scores. Everybody swore they were going to give it to Triple G, like they did it last time when again they went through twelve rounds and no knockout, but it didn’t happen that way. Canelo, the Mexican boxer, had covered Triple G with bodyblows, and the judges reacted. A welcome result for Mexican Independence!

They were explaining it to me as they were filtering back into the pool area. Canelo was a counterblow fighter. He waited for you to come to him and then reacted to you. Triple G was an attacker. That is how he won over the judges when they went to twelve rounds last time. This time, Canelo stunned the audience with a reverse in his strategy, and this is the part I found fascinating! He was on the attack. Triple G, as it was described to me, looked confused. Canelo got more punches in, including a battery of body blows. The judges had no other recourse but to recognize who was on top in the fight.

Why find such things fascinating when I don’t even like boxing? It wasn’t just about psyching the other guy out. It was about coming up with a winning strategy and being one step in front of the other guy. Imagine if Triple G resorted to a different strategy. Canelo’s plan would have gone out the window. But what if he was sure Triple G would do the same thing again because it was something that worked last time, and why fix a good thing? That might have been what cemented the change of strategy for Canelo. He would have had to not only think about doing it differently, but I imagine his training would have to reflect this too, and the real psych out would be the one of him trying to psych himself out, trying to become a different fighter, going through different routines.

Maybe Triple G wasn’t thinking at all; he just went with whatever was natural to him, uncompromising attacks. What if that was all he knew? I do believe the real winning move would be in deciding what kind of fighter Triple G was going to be in this second match. Canelo would have had to recognize on what level Triple G was playing and if Triple G was also switching his strategy according to what Canelo might be thinking of doing.

I am thinking of a little kid’s game of having the other kid guess which hand has the marble. After going through one round, if the one holding the marble were trying to be clever by keeping it in the same hand, the savvy kid would know it. If the kid chose a different hand thinking that the other kid expected him to be clever and keep the marble in the same hand, the kid that would know that about his opponent would guess correctly. The point was that you had to guess at what level the kid was playing.

Then again, it could have been nothing more than something as simple as Canelo using Triple G’s strategy because that was what worked in the first bout. It could also be that there aren’t that many strategies to choose from in boxing. There is the type of fighter that plays defensive, the type that favors coming in low or high, and the one that likes to keep his distance or clench to deliver the little kidney jabs. How many other possibilities are there? When you put accomplished fighters in the ring, they are going to bring their ultimate strategy, and maybe there is no choice in the matter because you have to pick the thing you’re best at, and everyone will know it, even the people like me that don’t know boxing, who are informed by the propaganda machine for such an event that educates the audience so that they have something in which to sink their teeth. I am sure it is something like that.

As we were getting back in the swimming pool, I was picking up the talk and able to describe what I saw of the fight. I didn’t even know what the two boxers looked like, and I was absorbing the excitement and letting the alcohol do much of the talking for me. I was so excited, who would have questioned me?

On Monday, they were asking me if I saw the fight when I was picking up my cup of coffee to start the day, and I was not lying when I said it was amazing, spouting off the mechanics behind the results as if I had known both men’s careers since before the first match. I was keeping my conversation rather long, giving a full summary, almost overcompensating for missing every little thing about it.

But I was there. I have no doubt about it. I was there, and I saw nothing. It is like calling a witness to the stand who was present during an incident but who was actually at an angle that would have given the witness no information whatsoever, and yet they call him anyway, and he states his observations, and they take them seriously. Or it is like the witness that was not there at all? They have a name for such people that know not a thing about the incident but deliver probable causes to an event. They are called expert witnesses.

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The Dream of a Thousand Hairs

15 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Was supposed to give a lecture, but there I was in a large room that was divided by a partition that started almost at the door, so that when you walked in, you had to decide immediately if you were going to go left or right. I went right, and it was packed. Girls were coming up to me, and I was smiling, wondering what kind of things I had to talk about. The left was a mystery, and it turned out to be a bedroom-full of ladies. And I’m not sure how I knew that since I didn’t take that direction. One woman, who used to be a TV star back when there were these daytime programs called soap operas, had a signed photograph she wanted to give me. She had other images of herself in the nude when she did that men’s magazine photo shoot that (I now vaguely remember) was a very hot thing — back when I was still getting wet dreams when placed in other dream situations with half naked women. Well, there she was half-naked in these pictures, but she carefully, diligently put those pictures away before I could make out the details. I was suddenly made aware that I could be looked at as one of those perverts young ladies set their racy alarms to private for, and this lady was not even young, but a part of the past, yet she still looked real good and even better than most of the girls in this crowd of bedroom hair covering the side walls and back walls. Played it cool. No other way to do it. I kept smiling to the crowd, making my way out of this place that was turning into a giant bed and going over back to the right, where images were on the giant screens in the back, and I was starting to talk about them with the voice of expertise. General things to say. Another ordinary occurrence. When another girl — a young lady this time — asked me to take her picture, just like the older actress had done. The actress was no longer on the left side. We went in there. Noticed the stage. She wanted me up there. I was looking around. The professional photos of the actress were on the giant screens. The actress was reclined with breasts hanging off of smooth, orange tan skin and the prettiest face that any TV screen could buy. The young lady and I were smiling at the bright spotlights, and when the flash came, I looked at the wall, where the resolution was projected and it was just me, no girl. My head. My hair. It was crazy and curly, like back in the day when I let it all hang out, like an explosion of ideas was making their way out from my cranium and curling in every direction because it didn’t know what it wanted.

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A Familiar Setting

25 September 2020 by Rey Armenteros

 

In another dream, I was checking into a hotel. My friend was leaving town, and he was helping me out. He took care of the paperwork before heading out on a flight to his home. I had brought some of my most important things, getting cozy in this new space with all the prospects with what I was about to do.

A town leaning up into the higher sides of a mountain comes back to me dream after dream. I seem to visit this place once every few years. It looks a little different every time, but it always feels like a resort of some kind, someplace to go to after taking a long journey.

Last night, I was checked in, as if it were a continuation of that other dream from one or more weeks ago. But instead of sleeping there, I was going to a friend’s party that was not too far away. The backyard was like a park, and the darkness of the early night hid what I felt were precipices that might have been behind everything or perhaps in another direction. We were standing around, holding our drinks. I was conscious of not straying too far into the darkness for fear of falling. I was already barefoot, since they had invited me to stay there for the night. An art installation was the centerpiece to this get-together. It was a space that you walked into. I was told to check it out, so I did. The small building was a square. It was the size of a modest dining room. Where the table would be was the main piece of art. It was like a column coming out of the floor that stopped short of chest high and then acted more like a pedestal for a bell that floated above it. That made the space into an angular donut that you had to walk around instead of through. I walked around it and took a look at the ground to find circles at regular intervals. It was glass, and I was stepping on it. I felt the need to exit, but there was still all of the other art that ran like a passage left of the room installation I was now walking around. But someone noticed the blood on my feet, and they insisted I walked out. That room I was just experiencing was the work of a famous artist. He was not just any artist but someone important to me. That is to say, I was not necessarily his biggest fan, but I knew of him in the circles of art that interested me, and I respected him. I think in our world, he was Anders Nilsen, but he could have easily been Dash Shaw. I slept in the room that my friends gave me, and when I woke up, it was still night time. This was another art space I was inhabiting, and it made me think of the square space with the broken glass. I don’t know what else I did. It was something interesting enough for me to note that this was a dream and that I had to hurry up and write this down. And by the time I did, this last part and whatever else went with it, was no longer making tracks in my thoughts.

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Ancient Humors

11 September 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The vampires frequented the cafeteria. Daytime haunts were nigh impossible. It was just the way. When the night was over, they’d get together at the favorite hangout spots throughout the Forbidden City. Yes, the sun could sear the flesh off one of their kind, but it was not so bad if you dressed in enough layers. The cafeterias were actually medicinal cafes. Vampires that went to such hangout spots after a feast were conscious of healthy habits. Most establishments carried an array of potions, and each one was brewed to take care of at least one type of ailment. All four humors had to coexist in the body with a fine balance. Blood came in and out, but so did phlegm, sweat, and bile. This was what vampires were truly made of. Taking medicine after a hunt altered the amounts. An order came with a test beforehand. A technician tested the blood intake afterward, but they also tested the other three humors because vampires sucked in all four according to their appetites during any given night, and biting to suck this stuff out was the way to go, the way to carry on life.

A haunting usually happened once a week. The adventurous crowd did it on the weekends when possibilities abounded, and possibilities also meant unpredictable situations which gave way to possible dangers. Danger was the style that these people followed. And the weary that finished by sunrise were prudent if they visited a medicinal cafe. It was the only way to curb the effects. Humans that were attacked only became a vampire when all four of their humors had been invaded. Some survived multiple attacks, but if it were the same humor, they were almost always okay afterward. Nevertheless certain effects would make themselves known, and this depended on the humor that had gotten the least volume in the body of the human. Most humans that turned were not that long for life because it was usually serious mistakes after their transformation that stamped their ignorance with instant death. There were simply things they would not know from the outset. The thing about sunlight had many misconceptions. And if someone were bitten for sweat or bile, they often assumed they were merely attacked by a psychopath.

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Slabs Under the Surface

04 September 2020 by Rey Armenteros

My father was in my dreams, and he was alive, but the rest of the family was dying. We were talking about this in his apartment unit. It was a space I had never been to before, but it felt familiar. The walls were bare of things. They were slabs of concrete coming together in corners, everything looking the same. It wasn’t somber, though it should have been. The entry room was the largest, and it had their bed with his wife in it, and she had passed on. My sister was going to die next. It was as if this was the way it was supposed to be. He didn’t feel good about any of this, but we were able to have a pleasant conversation anyway. I wonder now if he were trying to tell me something.

When I came to this morning, it would be back to the opposite way of things, how he was the one that was dead and all the others still alive. This is the first time I remember dreaming of my father in recent years. It might be the first time since his death. I don’t remember a single other thing that happened. I was struck by the layout of the place. That bed in the first room was strange and yet I knew it once, when we were small and getting picked up by him on Sundays to spend our allotted time with him. Diagonal to this first space was another one that was filled out like a dining room. The kitchen was around the corner of the wall, and when you turned that corner, a couple of smaller rooms followed, likely a bathroom and some manner of closet.

So, this is what my sleeping mind identifies as a studio, but it was not my grandmother’s, which is what reason would have told me it was. In my woken mind, I remember the layout of the earliest efficiency, and it was just a room with a place for kitchen appliances next to a tiny bathroom. The second space was after my dad had married his third wife, with whom he would have his second family with. For some reason, I remember the high windows, as if we were halfway underground. It was like a bunker, and he would lay in my grandmother’s cot and watch Mexican wrestling. Getting suddenly inspired, he would start twisting and pinning us to the bed, too rough for a five- and three-year-old. Actually, he hadn’t been remarried yet, but that was coming soon. And this was something that I had mentioned to my daughter the other day, how rough my father was when he was playing around, sending me surges of energy that stayed with me through the nights to finally visit me in this incantation of made-up situations around loved ones. How much charge did it get from memories, and how much is it charging the train of my thoughts for the remainder of the day?

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Earlier this Year

31 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

It has been raining so much in the past several months, I no longer pine for the calming murmur and the cool coziness. I’m frankly sick of it. We spent our first ten years here wondering if it ever rained in Southern California. I came to the conclusion that it was a desert in disguise. This whole area felt like a beachside paradise, but make no mistake — arid wasteland is what it was. No matter how much water you pump from the Colorado, if you fail to maintain this place, it will relapse to its lifeless origins. Just like an aging actor dependent on plastic surgeons. What else?

When I came up with these conclusions, I thought everybody was on the same page as me. I was firing up analogies I felt only succeeded in identifying one place on the face of the Earth. But with all these rains we’ve been having, I now bring it up again, asking neighbors and coworkers what the hell happened to all that dry weather? And they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I’m referring to the fact that suddenly we have all this rain — I mean real rain! Like the Miami rain I had grown up with, downpours, endless showers that spilled their abundance into gutters that were not quick enough to collect it all, forcing cars to suddenly hit the breaks so that they wouldn’t release a wall of water when hitting one of these broad puddles. To them — my neighbors and coworkers — it’s as if there were rain here all along.

I was questioning my own recollections, wondering if my point of view of having lived in only places that had a healthy dose of rain throughout the year had shifted my outlook. But I don’t think so. What’s ten years of barely having rain in a place when rain is inconsistent? The natives don’t recognize lapses of ten years because they are used to such pauses. It seems that it comes and goes every few years. Where I was wrong is that I concluded that this place had no other type of weather. What I was not aware of is that we likely arrived when it stopped raining for a spell of so many years, and now things are back to normal. The actual climate here is not temperate or subtropical or anything that sounds familiar; it is simply “unpredictable.”

I’ve always loved the rain, and that might have been because I was never a homeowner. Now that I am, with such spells of days filled with wet misery, I add every possible damage to the house to my growing mob of anxiety. And unpredictable is the type of climate that helps me surf through every worry.

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Filling Out Forms

17 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Charles Simic was the one I wanted to become my favorite poet. But I couldn’t for reasons I can’t get into. But then, the question would be who could be a valid candidate for a favorite poet?

This was not the thing on my mind when someone went up to my seven-year-old daughter and asked her about the book by Italo Calvino I had left on the table. I was witnessing this in my periphery because I was busy filling out a form. I could see my daughter pointing at me, and the lady approaching me. Point blank, she asked me if I was reading Italo Calvino. It’s not a question you normally get asked. I looked up from the form and thought about it. Italo Calvino didn’t just show up on that table one day. There was a progression to this. I started my answer by mentioning my quest for prose poetry. I brought up the first anthology of prose poems I had read. Then I said that led me to other anthology books. I kept taking looks over at the book where my daughter had already picked up her name badge, as if the book were the object that represented the accolades at the end of such a journey. I was conscious that my daughter’s dance recital was about to start, and I really had to finish this form.

The whole time I was explaining the book, the lady was nodding her head because she knew Calvino, and as a literature teacher, she was expressing amazement that anyone would even bother, practically praising me for doing such a thing.

Still conscious of the one or two minutes left to me, I continued. I didn’t know who I was talking to, but I thought it was prudent of me to bring up the third prose poetry anthology from which Calvino’s selection came, where I first encountered his work. I had known his name before, but it was thanks to this anthology that I could place a voice to the face. Six poems from his Invisible Cities were in the anthology, and the lady let me know she was aware of this book too. My daughter was waiting for me to finish filling out the form so that we could go in already because her audition was about to start. I was juggling all this in my head, simultaneously thinking about my address and other contact information for the form. Undeterred, I was plumbing through the recollected steps of my poetic journey, mesmerized by how I was answering about information I had always thought about but had never voiced. But then, she asked me who my favorite poet was, and I was nonplussed. I had no answer.

At that moment, one of the dance school teachers came out and told me it was time! Once I got inside, there was no time for poetry, and I had lost track of the lady.

She was obviously one of the mothers at the dance studio, but I had never seen her before. Even so, after our conversation, I was confident I’d see her again to continue this fascinating topic. In preparation for the second part to our conversation, I thought about her question, because it only made sense that you would have a favorite poet. I read Charles Simic the most, and I thought he was the natural answer. The problem was that the more I read him, the more I discovered we were not in step to the same rhythm. I was a different kind of reader than the type he was writing to, I thought. The more I read him, the more it seemed obvious he was not writing to anyone, actually.

Calvino could have been a contender. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler was the book the lady had found on the table, and I recall telling her that it was getting borderline annoying. I enjoyed the premise of the book, but the problem I had with it was also tied to the premise. The book was about how a reader (a generic reader who becomes an actual character in the book) starts reading a book but then, for various ludicrous reasons, cannot finish it as he starts the beginnings of other books. It was annoying in the manner that Calvino kept finding another outlandish reason why the next book and the next book could not be finished either. As it turned out, regardless of my annoyance, I finished that book a few days after the audition, and I found it was so well-written, that I pardoned this small slip and ended up loving the book as a clever piece of reasoning. But I probably would not include Calvino as a favorite poet because very little of what I have read of his can be classified as poetry.

I was stumped because I had no actual poet to point to and say that that person was my ideal creator. Even though as an artist, I don’t have a favorite painter, I was convinced I needed to have an answer ready for the next time I encounter the lady.

There was another angle to this. Having this brief dialogue with the lady at the audition reminded me that I needed to interact more with my fellow writers. I wanted to become a member of some writing club that knew about luminaries like Simic and Calvino. Having a literary instructor in the dance studio meant connections. The next opportunity for a casual conversation, I was going to ask her if she knew of any literary or poertry group.

That was when it occurred to me that I couldn’t recall what the lady looked like. Every time I went to the dance studio after that, I was very aware of the possibility that I could be walking right past her without saying a thing. She never approached me again, and I wondered if it were because she thought I was snubbing her.

My plans for belonging to a writing society were fizzling. Then, a few weeks after the audition, we got quarantined with the pandemic. It was fate, as I was starting to read it in the cards. At home now with plenty of time to read and assess, I can go back to the question of who is my favorite poet, and I have yet to come up with anything. I go back to Charles Simic and read and read the same poems to see if I still have a chance of fitting him into this ideal. It has to be in there somewhere.

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A Motorcycle Dream

03 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Out from our travels came our time. We ended up in Japan. A new life, a new bike, more times to come. My wife was off with friends. I was studying my new motorcycle, getting a lay of the land from our home. The upstairs room was no larger than a cockpit, but it was cute. I was in it, studying the little keys. They were toy keys, like the type you can bend with three fingers. They were for the motorcycle. You could actually take the handlebar off, I guess for security reasons. I was playing with it outside, wondering how we were going to make life with this motorcycle work. Downstairs, the one lavatory was nothing more than a toilet taking up center space, surrounded by patterned curtains in mostly red. I was getting a phone call. My wife was telling me about her time. But then, two men entered our habitation and went into the bathroom together. My wife was describing the half Japanese singer that sang well, even though he smelled bad, and I was trying to talk to the two guys behind the curtain. They were taking turns defecating, making a virtual party of it. When they were bowing and thanking me as they exited, I noticed all the shit stains covering the toilet bowl. I had hung up, and didn’t know what to do. I felt the motorcycle would be in danger. I went out to try to take it for a spin. It was not easy since I was not a motorcyclist. When I came back, it was evening again, and our residence was now acting like a restaurant. Now I understood why there was only the small space upstairs and the toilet in the center of the communal living space. The owner was giving me a sly look from behind the counter. He was reprimanding me in a jocular fashion because they had quite a job cleaning the bathroom. I was giving him my best facial expression for such an event, almost explaining to him the two homeless guys, but I then started to go through mental math about why we couldn’t live there anymore, and then I woke up.

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