Category Archives for: Ancedote

Lola

12 June 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Being original is going against expectations. I was working at changing everything about me. You know how people react to things. The obvious answers to situations were what you didn’t want. So you worked at the opposite. You don’t want to be a type, but being the person that goes against the grain just becomes another type.

Ultimately, what was I going to make of myself in this memoir piece that came from source materials so old, I had long lost any strain of visceral connection with it? I was trying to pick her up, but she was a mother, and I wasn’t sure if I was interested in going in that direction. None of this was made up, and even so, this was not really my story. What I mean by this is that it was something that happened thanks to the mother, me, and the baby, along with a bunch of other people that were falling in and out of our conversations. These other people would be called minor characters in a work of non-memoir, but that was a reductive way of looking at the affects each one created for us. So, in a sense, I was not the author because there were too many things to it that did not have their origin in me. Truly, I had no interest in playing with her kid, but it was that thing that we are expected to do when an infant is present. That means that I didn’t even have the power of volition in this, which makes me less of a source.

If I were writing this script, I’d make the mother upset. He’s horsing around too much, and the playing with her kid is getting prolonged. That would make the story more interesting. In the real event, everybody was being polite, the mother looking on with a stiff smile, probably waiting for it to be over already. She never struck me as the patient type. Actually, I never got to know her because relations were cut off soon after this. There is no chance we could ever meet again today. But still, I have to play it safe and come up with a name for her that feels like her real name, but it has to be a name that is different enough so that she wouldn’t’ recognize it in the event she stumbled on my writing, happened to remember my name, and then recognized herself in this little anecdote that was growing to be more and more meaningless. If I were coming up for a name for her, it was going to be Adeline. Her name was actually striking, and in the time we went on those couple of dates, it really meant something. It was after it was over that it meant everything that was bad. And honestly, I am going to have to embellish those ugly parts with some better details. So for this recounting, I name her Adeline because that is a name that doesn’t mean anything to me yet, and so it can grow with what it could mean in this retelling.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Memoir, ReyA' | Tags: literature, memoir, tiny piece

The Long Reflection of the Present

05 June 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I am thinking back on that time when I made all these paintings. It wasn’t just one time, but they are grouped now by the position I have now in regards to them: they are the past, through which all things seem to be in a continuum, and I am in the present.

I am photographing them, remembering what they meant to me while I was making them. How could I forget when there must have been a time (a single moment) when each one meant everything to me! In one flow of days (that perhaps spilled into weeks), this one naked woman made of acrylic paint was a beauty I was trying to recreate from what could be memory mixed with longing. I can’t remember a thing about it now (not one wish that fueled the drive for this one piece), but it was strong apparently, because it carried me forward to the end, where I deemed it finished. I gloated, and then on to the next.

I will be using their photographs as if they represent my present work, and in a sense, they do because they are the latest that I have shown, but if I am photographing them, it means they have nothing to do with what I am doing now.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Art Process, ReyA' | Tags: anecdote, art process, tiny piece

A Philosophical Take on a Mundane Occurrence

17 May 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When putting gas or delaying it until the next drive, what is the proper perspective? I have always thought it was stretching the tank as far as possible in order to do fewer gas station visits in one lifetime.

I haven’t met a person that thinks like this, but I am sure there are a lot of people that that put such things together like that.

I do know some people are procrastinators. They just won’t do it if they can wait a little longer, even if it means that they will have a harder time with it later. This is a completely different angle on the same thing.

Imagine being stuck in traffic on your way to work and then desperately needing to fill the tank! This is a possibility both of these perspectives open up.

I am starting to think that if you want to find a reason for going to the gas station only when you absolutely need to, it’s better to take the position of the procrastinator. You delay in order to put aside that which you need to do, instead of philosophizing about the end of your life measured along a track of how many times you escaped doing something unpleasant.

I don’t want to be the procrastinator, and I don’t want to think the way I have about such things anymore. I am starting to consider little duties like pumping gas as moves that need to be timed. For example, if I have a quarter tank, it may be enough for the weekend, but then what about work on Monday? The right move is to do it now, so that you don’t do it under duress.

Reflecting on this for a second, I have the feeling that this is how most people behave, just from my chats about other’s weekends, including their obligatory trip to the gas station. In fact, it is starting to dawn on me that this is how everybody does it — except procrastinators, of course. I feel that with this new outlook, I have attained a modicum of wisdom, but then that means wisdom is far more common than I expected before I ever started attaining any of it.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Ludicrousness, ReyA' | Tags: literature, tiny piece

Two Cracks on the Wall

26 April 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I don’t think I’m ever going to make it in any satisfactory way — not in my lifetime. This is the thought that robs me of hope on certain mornings, when I wake up with a clear mind and with enough disposable minutes that allow me to stay under the comforter to mull things over. It must be “certain mornings,” because it may need ingredients to get that piece of “certain” to come about in the way that it does. I have no idea what is contained in the ingredients. All I know is that it involves a state of mind that feeds dreams and is in turn fed by the dreams afterward.

The other night, I was in the middle of a dream that I actually remembered. I was in a dark room, my living room, and I felt the first tremors of an earthquake. Since I was actually sleeping on the couch in my living room, my mind was identifying this as if it were really happening. In the dream, I was looking out the window, and I noticed that the wall that has a crack on it since we moved here had another one that I somehow understood was even older. It had been patched up without attention to craft, and the color of the filler didn’t even go with the color of the wall. How could I ever not notice such a thing in the three years that we have lived here?

Then, there was an instance of dream logic where I was able to see something from outside the house even though I was inside. In this view, I recognized the street even though it was nothing like our real neighborhood outside the dream. The worst part about the growing earthquake was that our house was the only one visibly affected. It was moving us around, and I could picture the center of this knot under us, as if we were going to disappear into the bowels of the earth — we, and no one else. When it was over, our house had been pitched to the side. We could see it from the outside as it was happening, like a shoe box that had been turned over. And we were trying to push it back off its side to put it back on its foundation.

I woke up in my dark living room, and I could see from the sliding glass doors looking into our backyard that there was no such second crack on the wall. But I knew where such an idea came from. This dream transpired in the first weeks of the virus quarantine. Anxieties were multiplying. I was not looking forward to the next day. I had to make a few unpleasant phone calls that had to do with our house and with our car. Official payments and paperwork that had not been completed on the part of institutions that had the responsibility of looking out for us. I had to summon anger, and I resented them for making me do this.

Since last year, I have been concerned with the crack on the wall that separates our backyard from that of our rear neighbors. It looks like it is progressing because of the neighbor’s tree near the wall that may be pushing into it. With the present quarantine, that problem itself has been pushed back, because we have more important matters to think about. But it’s still in the background, a little bit more in the distance but still visible.

While fixing up my first cup of instant coffee, I was trying to see if the pieces fit. Dreams can tell the future or have you meet with someone in another kind of reality. Dreams could also expose those fears we have inside us, and this was how I interpreted my little nightmare. It was obvious to me, although in the end, who knows? I was worried about those damned phone calls. I took those feelings straight to bed. They manifested with older fears, also related with the house, and I substituted one for the other. It was as simple as that. That dream was nothing more or less than a mirror held up to my subconscious.

It affected the rest of my day. The equation, therefore, may look like this: worries disguised themselves in that other realm as older, less significant worries, stirred with the idea of an earthquake, and they emerged on the other side to temper the coming day with nothing but shit.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Memoir, ReyA'

Rearview Perspective

22 March 2020 by Rey Armenteros

A rearview mirror has a limited breadth. In this small area, I was watching a man in a wheelchair contend with getting out of the car and pressing the latch that would close his trunk from where he probably took out the wheelchair. I was getting comfortable and had not yet turned off the car. I was listening to a song I wanted to finish. And I was looking at this man have to go through his maneuvers. I assumed he worked at the college because he was parked in the “Staff” lot.

The world has made it easier for this person to be independent. The wheelchair was a well-calibrated piece of machinery, helping him direct it at every turn of the wrist. I was studying him in my rearview, suddenly self-conscious of what I must have looked like. I was the routine indifferent jackass who had suddenly had a moment of understanding.

He was gone, and in the limited scope of this rearview, I saw another person get out of her car, and then another that was closer to me, presently closing the door and locking it. Each staff member going to work was one row closer to me. It was layers of distance.

I then took notice of how the electric light in this parking garage did not cross the sunlight coming through various openings, and yet the frontier mixture of the two types of light were running softly together, providing me with the ambient light I could not quite see.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, ReyA' | Tags: literature, tiny piece

Another Writing Game

19 January 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I was between lives in Japan: new apartment, looking for a new job. All my foreign friends from the previous job had taken their flights back to their respective countries. I was finally alone — no more friends in our community to take up my time. I now had extra time for writing and working on my art — even if now, I had no one to talk to.

I had spent months without writing a fragment or making a doodle. Now, I had nowhere to start. The countless ideas and fascinating experiences that were tumbling toward me everyday I lived in this foreign land were not enough to get me going.

At the library, I found a small section of books in English. I wanted to read whatever I could from Japan. I found an English translation of a book on Japanese poetry from a thousand years ago that collected the “one hundred best poems.” I read the book and didn’t think much of it in the end.

But this particular edition was illustrated by simple black and white images that seemed to have come from woodcuts, one for each poem in the book. The images were similar to one another, so much so that many of the personages seemed the same. They had nothing to do with the poems, which had come from varying sources. The images were obviously influenced by the stylistic limitations of the artist. This person seemed to be drawing the same bald monk in the same temple settings doing various things. I got the wild idea I was going to narrate these pictorial adventures. I had a recurring character and setting and situations. I came up with a few rules for my writing game. Each image was going to be depicted by a single sentence. They had to narratively connect. And I had to do this with no planning, in one sitting.

By the end of the story, I had a hundred sentences that the sharp eye of an expert reader would recognize as something that was brewed off the seat of your pants. It was experimental, yes, but not interesting, really.

It didn’t matter. If it were a game that you can win or lose, then I lost, as the story clearly showed. Most such experiments are adventures against what seems like opponents that are invincible. But the forward energy it created cascaded into the next thing and the next. Over the following nine months in Japan, I was writing everyday. The results were often surprising, as if in this new place, I were wrestling with a new way of thinking. I was also drawing some of the most inventive (if not effective) ink wash paintings I had done till then. Are such games the type that you win? I know the answer to this, but I feel I still have to ask.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Writing Process | Tags: literature

A Writing Game

06 January 2020 by Rey Armenteros

“A hotbed of dire farce.” Sometimes, there is no other reason to string words together than that you just want to see them interact.

You write them, and you look at them. No, it still makes no sense, this grouping of incongruous words, but it might be the start of something larger. You pursue it. From experience, you already know it can only go one of two ways: a surprise success or that far more possible alternative. You go forward anyway, because even though the chances are slim, it is much better to try than to do something else. Plus, you have nothing better going on now, and you do want to write. (The problem just now is you don’t really have anything to say.)

I lean back. I read this over and over. It certainly sounds familiar. I want to move on and make this happen. But having nothing to write about is a situation that comes from no practice — from not spending the time over the past weeks because I happened to have been engrossed with other things.

Hark! I hear a tingling sound from outside. It is gone as soon as it arrives, and I can’t identify it. I am sitting here pulling at anything for a proper idea. What can such an exterior audial invasion do for me? I am reaching for anything. Then, the words I started this with come back to me. They can be used to finish this tiny piece of verbiage so that I can move on already with my day. I am rolling their special interrelationships in my thoughts and getting nothing. A frame would have wrapped this up tidily as I unravel what is this hotbed of dire farce. But I can’t do such a thing, and it is better now to just end it on anything.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Writing Process | Tags: literature

The Tautology

22 December 2019 by Rey Armenteros

I found a list in a notepad. The first line read “One Day Long (312),” followed by “This is not an allegory (1-9).” It was like trying to figure out code. But I was the one that had made up this puzzle. And yet I couldn’t figure it out. I kept reading.

“Falling Again, Again.” “Orange Cola Blues.” I make laundry lists like this for snippets of ideas I have that I’d like to explore later. But I couldn’t get a handle on any of this.

I couldn’t read the next one because it was illegible, but the one following simply said “Microwave.” Then, it was another illegible word followed by Beyond, and then another illegible word — “Something Beyond Something.” I’d like to say it says people in both places, but I was not too sure.

Even so, it was riveting.

“Dressed in Blue Eye Shadow.” And then I stopped. That one gave it all away! They were the new titles of old poems I had reworked last year.

How could I forget this? It disturbed me. But I was delighted anyway, and I immediately wanted to seek these old poems out and get reacquainted with them.

I usually scratch out these scrawled reminders after they were resolved to avoid confusion later. I was about to put lines through these when I decided not to. I was going to find this again maybe next year, and the same mystery would unfold and lead me back to these poems once again.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Memory, Poetry | Tags: literature

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