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Category Archives for: ReyA’

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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Hammer & Mauling

29 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When my own life was the most important thing to me, I used to be an extremist. If I was hot, I’d crank up the AC as far as it could go, and the same went the other way. I didn’t have a middle ground because the middle ground was like no man’s land. It held nothing of interest for me.

When I played a game, it was about building up forces. Yes, I allowed the opponent to position himself in the best place without hindrance, while I was allowing loss of ground purely for the interest of hammering him hard in the end. Actually, it was the end that was so important to me. It had to involve the strike of a hammer.

That is why I never won anything. I was not good at Chess, and when I was introduced to a new game, I would find a way to work it so that I would sacrifice initiative and the gaining of ground to build that heavy army to come forward and devastate right at the end, just like in the movies.

If a game did not allow the opportunity to build up your forces, then it was not my type of game, and I would probably not play it for long. In practical matters outside the realms of gaming, this made me somebody who was constantly burning or freezing.

I would slowly freeze in my room and never even notice that I needed to put on a sweater or to turn on the heater. Maybe I was off in other worlds. I never noticed noises either. If we were playing paintball war games out in the Everglades, noises were what you had to go on because they were what spelled out who was near you when you were hiding in the bushes ready to ambush your friends. That meant I was good at tuning out the shit from neighbors too, although I was such a light sleeper, a noise of any kind always bothered me, nonetheless.

In Chess, my friend had an easy time with me, toying with me because of my obvious propensities. As we were setting up the board on our first game, I told him I liked knights best of all, and he then started the game by annihilating my knights. I thought he was just being a jerk, but later he confessed that he had been reading a book on Chess psychology. It brought up the new Chess of the day, where you use the opponent’s attitudes and whims against them. If somebody said they liked their horses, and you took them out in the beginning moves of the game, you were not just sending a message by capturing them, you were also making the opponent upset, playing this person, making him desperately look for a move for revenge. Another good reason to remove the knights was that if that person were telling the truth and they were good at using the knights, it was best to remove them early. And as every Chess player knows, knights are most useful in the beginning, anyway.

At the time, all of this was shooting over my head. I wasn’t good enough to know how to use horses well enough, anyway. I just knew my friend was annoying. I did want to get revenge, and this kind of attitude always got me into worse trouble.

Later, I was living on the other side of the country, and when I came back for Christmas, I played my friend, and he was shocked. In our first game in almost a year, I was putting him in a corner, and he wanted to know how I got better.

I didn’t study the game, and I didn’t practice. But I was a different player. I went through experiences in this other city, and I became a different person. My behavioral clock had been retuned, and I was making decisions in different ways. That was how I was adding it all up.

On a Chess board, I was playing in a way where every piece and pawn was susceptible to sacrifice if it got me closer to the opponent’s king. I was now playing with the speed of developing your forces and with the understanding that the pieces themselves were not important; rather, what was important was their proximity to the other king.

We played three times during my visit. I beat him twice and had him in the ropes in the third game when he was finally understanding what it was I was doing. We didn’t finish that last game, but I have to admit he was about to turn it around.

I was going through life now moving with the moment. If I lost my horses in a Chess game, that only meant I didn’t lose something else, and it might give the opponent the false sense that they had done something valuable, pinning them to a strategy that might not have worked. I was going with the flow, and I now knew that speed was important. If I needed to sacrifice some pieces to get that much closer to the throat of my opponent, I was going to relieve myself of those pieces.

The one thing I was not doing correctly was being judicious with my sacrifices because sacrifices that did not share mutual destruction with opponent pieces were going to weigh heavily on the player who was two or three pieces behind toward the end of the game. If I got my opponent quickly, it might work, but if the game dragged, I would likely lose. It was the idea of hitting someone with everything you had, fast. I was starting to notice that it was not a winning strategy in the long run. Once my friend knew what I was doing, he could hold back and wait until I was weak enough to overwhelm. I thought I had hit the perfect strategy and was proved wrong, and when I looked at it hard enough, it was nothing but a different version of the old hammer I used to rely on, except this speedy attack was more like mauling.

Eventually, I did get to study Chess a little. I read books about certain tactics. I was never a real Chess player because you have to study the openings, and I never did. Openings didn’t interest me. But I was reading books about Chess psychology and began to understand my friend. He was still a better Chess player than I was, but I could now give him a run for his money.

With time, I can’t say I ever got significantly better. I was still using a modified version of my maul. If my old hammer were the slow move to the explosion at the end, the maul was the fuse already lit at the start with the idea that we were not going to ever reach the end. Both approaches were still about climax. That quirk was still inside me. I would still crank up the heater in response to my being cold.

When I think about this, I must have been doing it because I waited until the last moment of being cold — until it finally dawned on me I was cold — to rip it open and reverse the tide of frost. For me, it was only natural to go to extremes, and I think it was because I liked to experience the sudden changes. If you wash your car after six months of it collecting dust, it was satisfying to wipe off the grime and witness dramatic changes in surface gloss, beholding the filthy water run down the driveway.

I got into a couple of other games. It was funny, but with me, it was always about war games. I would play a skirmish-style game, and again, I would go into the extremes of mauling the other war band with sudden death, if not getting mauled myself.

When I got into board games of all types, I slowly started understanding the parameters of certain games. Now that I was exposing myself to a vast variety of these new board games, I discovered that there were all types of games out there. As I slowly became a better overall player in different types of games, I was starting to wean out the old bad habits. I now started to understand that games were about balance and timing, as well as playing your opponent against self (the psychological factor). If you were hoarding your forces until they were ready, you were not playing with timing or balance, and your opponent can see the slow-moving punch coming at them with enough time to do something about it.

Enlightenment comes in bits and pieces. It is no exaggeration when I say that games have changed the way I go about a problem and how I make decisions in life and in my work. They also honed my ability to focus, to go about the next few steps in any process, whether it be in games, art, or writing. When enlightenment finally arrives, you quickly gather that you had it wrong all along. Because now you know better.

I haven’t played Chess in a long time, what with all these games that are more fascinating right now. These days, it’s getting colder, and I noticed that I apply the force that is needed in my car’s heater almost like a chemist who needs the right amount, and if I need to adjust, I do so with the slightest change as if getting that exact number to make the interior of my cabin perfect. So instead of the extremist that allowed his fingernails to go opalescent, I am someone fascinated with precision.

An extremist takes his argument to its logical conclusion, much to the chagrin of anybody going against the argument. This was the seed of feuds that progressed outside of game environments and thermometers. I used to have a logically sound argument to defend any point, no matter how inconsequential. And nowadays, in order to retain precision in a discussion where both sides do not agree, let’s say, I profess to not really know very much about anything — not in any significant way. My viewpoint is still lurking in the background, and I now defend it with just the right amount of detail and force, coupled with the right timing to deliver the best argument. In the interest of not losing when it really matters, I keep myself and my tendencies out of it, playing the opponent and not myself. It makes life simpler, and it keeps me sharp.

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A Little Respect for a Thirty Thousand-Year Old Tradition

22 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

As an artist who uses paint to make his objects, I take a measure of color and mix it with another measure of color. I try to get it just right, but I often overcompensate so that I have enough. I then choose the right brush for the job. It depends on the size of the area I am covering and the shape of it and the effect I am trying to get.

When I apply paint, there is a three-dimensional aspect that might not be taken into account unless you’ve done this before. The paint goes on a surface that has some form of surface characteristic. It could be a texture, or it could be something more subtle than that. As you apply more paint, you are adding onto this surface. Even with a medium like acrylic paint, which is supposed to dry flat, you get a buildup of layers that add to the surface tension. The next application of paint will be affected by what lies underneath.

The changes of surface can grant different possibilities. If I work a wash of color on a granulated surface, it would spread through the crevices and create a soft cloud of veiny transparency. If I applied pasty opaque colors on the same surface, the colors would skip over the tops of the granulation giving me broken colors. If I scrub the same paint on that surface, it would give a hazy, dirty effect. If I dabbed three different colors from my palette and let them work wet-into-wet onto that surface, it would be and yet another effect that I cannot quite predict right now because it would depend on the proportions of color and the amounts of paint and how diluted they are, among other factors. And that underlying surface would affect my efforts in one of many, many ways that I’m not sure can even be categorized.

Once the painting is done, we have something else that the surface of the painting does. These are the possibilities of the painting for the viewer and not necessarily the artist. The painting catches the light a certain way because of the surface. The viewer detects that surface with every shift of their feet or slightest turn of the head. Light shimmers and plays off the surface making it alive. This painting has a tactility on display that is in every way a part of the painting and that can not be recreated in any reproduction of it, whether in high-quality photographs or video recordings of it. In fact, it is an object that may be mostly flat, but it has a third dimension of depth that is there, even if small and subtle, and this depth creates the agency of life in this otherwise inanimate thing.

Furthermore, the direction of the paint strokes might move along the form of the figures in the painting. They might help to intimate corporeality in the depiction of humans, flowers, buildings, or mountains. In a nonrepresentational painting, globs of paint concoct their own delight. Swirls of glossy paint can look exquisitely delicious for no other reason than to celebrate the combination of colors that may only hint at something else like an old reminiscence, not just through the color palette chosen, but through its transparency and thickness.

Layers of transparent colors create optical effects that can be seen in no other way, as the old masters have shown in countless paintings. A cloth painted in purples and whites and yellows all mixed together would not be the same as the same cloth made with strokes of the same colors in translucent layers. The former is alla prima painting, and the latter is working in glazes. You have the option of one or the other, as well as many other methods. Your alla prima painting can be an impasto work that juts out of the surface in puffs of color like on a birthday cake, or it could be textureless.

I think these are valuable properties in a work of art. It has weight. It takes up space. It possesses the physical properties of an actual object. I can make things happen with these properties. I can appreciate them as a viewer when face-to-face with a painting on the wall. I can hold it and turn it around if I wanted to.

When I think about the limitless physical qualities of a painting, I wonder what about it can be said to be an analog? What does that even mean? Analog? What is the painting analogous to? Since making art is the oldest thing we humans have evidence of doing (as shown in works of art that are far older than anything else that survived antediluvian civilizations), I come to the conclusion that making a painting like this cannot be an analog to anything humankind has any memory to. So why do some people call it analog painting? Yes, there are people out there that call actual painting, analog painting. Where did this inappropriate term come from?

If you are familiar with the term, then you might have a guess about its origins. I have a theory. The software industry responsible for the imaging systems on computers had to come up with new terminology, based on clarifying the products they were releasing. They were touting the line of digital imaging, and under that broad umbrella, there was something they were developing they called “digital painting.” It was basically forming computer “tools” that attempted to emulate the experience of making a painting but solely on a device’s screen. How do you distinguish this from the other kind of painting? You couldn’t call the medium of pushing paint around on a canvas as “real” painting because it made your product sound flimsy by comparison. You couldn’t even call it “physical” painting, because even though it sounded a little more neutral, it still implied the same thing.

As an industry, you want this new term to fulfill two things at once. You want to distinguish that other product from your own product, and you want to put down the older technology because you feel your product is superior to the old-fashioned materials. You reach back in the recent eras of technology to fish around for some word that could sideways label the old stuff and at the same time deliver it a backhanded slap. Other digital industries were already using the old word “analog” to rest its case about what was so inferior about anything that was not digital. What better word?

So, why am I insulted? It is ironic, because if you are not in the business of making art, you probably never heard of analog painting. It is the working professionals themselves — the ones who should know better — that have adopted the term. I doubt most of the public is even aware of digital painting or of that ugly term for real painting.

I have nothing against digital imaging in general. It can produce some innovative images, and on occasion, I get inspired by someone coloring a comic book with a strange palette I had never seen before or by a graphic designer who juxtaposed elements from various images on a poster or website page. There are fine artists that do marvelous things with computer imaging, and my defense is not leveled against any of these areas.

Digital painting, on the other hand, is a branch of digital imaging that doesn’t always bring about the most interesting results. This is when a digital imagist strives to push around pixels in a manner that seems similar to the way that paint is moved. Through an indirect device, “digital painters” try to rehash painting techniques established by physical materials that have always had direct access to these techniques.

This new type of pixel manipulation has a plethora of brush possibilities that can create all manner of effects with whatever color you choose, and you can manipulate them afterward. You can even invent your own brushes and tools in the program. Digital watercolor has wet-into-wet. The strokes of digital pastels admit textural patterns analogous to actual pastels. And so on. But is it the same?

I have always found it a little strange that this growing new technology aspires to emulate a technology that is at least thirty thousand years old — and not doing it too well as I write this. It may one day actually fool everybody, but even if that ever happens, it cannot emulate the physical properties of a painting on a glaring screen. You can’t get those properties when you print it out either. In essence, you are making a painting that does not really exist except as a bunch of colors that come on a device when you summon it with a few clicks. As technologies make their shifts over the coming decades and inevitably supplant older ways of viewing image files, I would be a little concerned if my career were mostly based on work that takes up no space in this world.

If you are a commercial artist that wants to make a painting-like illustration for a client, then I can see the great advantages of “digital painting” over anything that came before it. It is convenient and fast. If something needs alteration, it can be done without tearing down anything from before. Everything is saved, and if you ever have to go to a previous step that might have been buried under some color, then you can. This flexibility is invaluable to someone who is working on the clock, where time is money.

I guess these thoughts are really for those that are aware of digital painting and the other term and have not really thought about why they even use the other term. You can call the work of illustrators digital painting if you want. In my view, you don’t have a painting if you are not in fact using paint, but I can understand the convenience of this term and will not roll my eyes the next time I hear it. But please, please do not call what I do analog painting. There is nothing analogous about it, the term does not mean what it describes, and you are going to risk insulting me and every painter that is practicing today, along with every painter that came before all of us.

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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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The Enticement of Blood over Elegance

08 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The fight was coming on. We were talking about it poolside, with beers and party snacks. I was not one who followed boxing. I didn’t care for it, but as with anything else, it was something I could get into if everybody else did. This match was highly-publicized, and this one house in the middle of our little neighborhood was just one of the millions throughout America having a similar home event.

But I wanted to talk anyway, and though I didn’t have anything to say about boxing, I brought up MMA. These days, it was different than in the days when I was watching it. So, I subtly brought up those old days. The Mixed Martial Arts institution had gone through some big changes. When I was living in Asia, I was watching the Japanese version of the sport, which was called Pride. In it, you had contenders from all over the world, showing off talents that came from different disciplines of martial arts. That was the part of it I loved; you could never really predict what was going to happen because there were too many variables. It made the matches unpredictable, which meant to me that they were exciting!

But not everyone agreed. The guy that was listening to my reminiscences of Pride was saying how things were cleaned up nowadays. You could now see that it is more elegant in its present incarnation than in what was going on before. Now, it’s respectable.

But I wouldn’t be too interested in it now precisely for that reason. I wasn’t looking for elegance and respectability. I mean, do you want to see guys beating on each other or not? People who are not into boxing consider boxing brutal — a cruel sport! The old MMA was far worse, but why split hairs on what is elegant and what is not brutal? Is it less brutal now? If so, then by how much? If you don’t want broken limbs and a profusion of blood, then watch boxing.

In Asia, I couldn’t understand what they were saying in the Pride matches because they were not translated into English, but what did you need to know when two guys were duking it out? I had my favorites. From the pictures of the flags, I knew what nationality they represented. There were all types from various parts of the world, and I only identified them by country and description, since I never learned their names. There was the short Brazilian guy who looked like a thug and the Croatian cop (shown in uniform when the stats came up) who was good with high kicks. Eventually, I got to know who was the champion, a Russian, an undefeated, stoic-looking man who was dumpy-looking compared to some of the more muscular contenders. Anything goes! Now, they have weight divisions and all the other regulations, but in those days, a giant can go against an average man, a bodybuilder could go up against an obese mountain.

If you go further back to when the whole thing started, you had American ninjas against judo black belts against green berets against kick-boxers. Fingers got broken. Arms were snapped. Right there on TV! Completely legal and solicited by a multi-million dollar corporation. It was great fun for the boys that remembered the schoolyard fights, the pitting of one superhero against another in the comic books, always wondering who was going to win.

I remember Gracie. The Gracies were a staple in MMA. They were the most famous martial arts family in the world. The bout was uneven. The massive man in nothing but tiny briefs was a muscle house, and he was on top of average-size Gracie, who was still clad in his Jiu jitsu gi, like a little boy showing off his uniform, though I don’t know how he kept it on for so long, as the big guy was grabbing and yanking on it, moving Gracie under him, trying to get him in a proper choke hold. Gracie was doing nothing but squirming his way out of it again and again. Gracie’s face was suspended by that one horrified expression, and meanwhile the big guy was pounding on his face, giving him body blows, pushing for that opening he needed to choke Gracie out. This was going on for fifteen whole minutes — interminable — exactly like that! With the guy on top of Gracie, manipulating him! Gracie was under the guy, making his way across the mat, and the guy was delivering blow after blow, trying to weaken him enough to get the grab to choke him out. It was almost unnoticeable, but when Gracie repositioned his leg to go across the man’s chest, it simply looked like a desperate defensive move, and then it shifted. Using his leg and arms, Gracie choked the guy out, and we went crazy! How could he do that? It was amazing. After all that, Gracie won!

That was the type of factors I was talking about. Anything could happen. This brand of competition was far more real to young men in those days than boxing could ever be. It was not about elegance; it was about spectacle. The brutality proved which type of bout was the true inheritor of the Roman circuses, made for the blood-thirsty masses that were not required to know a thing about the various martial arts involved. By contrast, you had to know about boxing to appreciate it, like you had to intimately know about baseball to be a fan. I do recall that along with all the other types of fighters, boxers tried MMA, and they just couldn’t compete.

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The Butterfly

01 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The guy was here, but not permanently. He still had his Florida plates, even after half a year. Was he biding his time, seeing how it was going to turn out for him here? Was he just hedging his bets? I didn’t really care. He was the crooner at the crafts shindig at June’s house, the guy who sounded like he was duplicating the Jazz Singer, what one of the attendants referred to as a lounge lizard, singing old songs even memory itself no longer remembers, all washed out. I met the guy that once, found out he was from my neck of the woods, and I wished him some good luck in making it out here. Then, I bumped into him in the mall a few months later, but we pretended not to know each other. Maybe I looked familiar to him, but I passed him by. I just didn’t want to get into it. Now, I see the guy’s car parked in front of June’s house every morning, still with the same license plate, as if he had one foot turned toward the exit, just in case. Was he living there?

I wanted to ask Carl about him, but Carl was another strange case. He was the friendliest guy in the neighborhood, the guy who knew everybody, the guy who would go out of his way to introduce you to everybody. We were just moved in last year, hardly knew anybody in the neighborhood, and Carl was there to make things right. But he was the type that was too accommodating. I started wondering about him. I mean, he was retired, so the puzzle fit together. He had all the time in the world for you. I knew one thing: people that smile so much come in few varieties. I thought I recognized his smile. It was the type that proposed a certain sociable veneer because he needed it more than anything else in his life. Maybe he was lonely. Being retired could do that to you. But he was healthy and strong. He went to places to get things done for other people, often at minimal cost, even for free. These favors were for old friends he had; these people were all over A_____. The town of A_____ had some lifers that supported each other. It was a tiny city in California that was almost surrounded by the more prosperous C_____. I was just getting to learn about our little city, but you can’t quote me on any of it. I no longer care for local histories.

Carl saw me outside my open garage one morning, cleaning out some boxes. He swung by, and I asked him about the other Miami guy, the lounge singer. He said, “Oh him. He’s still trying to make it out here, but he’s just not making friends. He’s too picky. I was telling him if he wanted to make money, he could, but he had to learn to bend a little. This lady, Jacky, I know who’s well-connected with the city — she was really helping him out, introducing him to the right people, people with connections. She got him a gig with the city. But he wouldn’t listen to her suggestions. If somebody who’s helping you tells you that it might be better to change your music, wouldn’t you think about maybe working with the person, especially since she got you an ad for the show in the paper? That’s big. But he doesn’t want to see it that way. I’ve talked to him about it. He says his music is his, he was going to express himself the way he saw fit. He said it was his art, and that nobody was going to tell him how to do it. Wouldn’t you at least try?”

It’s easy to ask those questions. In all my interactions with Carl, he had always played it off like he was an artist, but not the right type if he believed everything he just said. I don’t know anything about that watered down jazz they used to play in hotel lounges, but an artist who can be made to bend is an artist that can be made to be broken. You have to have spine, or you end up cracked in the middle when people like these well-placed women and men are done with you. You sit there in the dark, looking out a window, wondering if you had done it your way, would it have been different. I don’t agree with him at all, but I was making like I was too busy huffing boxes to give him a proper answer.

Carl lived at June’s, with June and her husband, and I don’t know what their story was. At first, I thought they were related, but they’re not. Why was he living there for so long? I later gathered they needed him to take care of their wheelchair-bound daughter, and that would make sense. I asked him a couple of times, but for as talkative as Carl usually is, he just clammed up and answered with grunts or one-word sentences. It was obviously a touchy subject. I didn’t want to sound too inquisitive, so I left it at that. This other day he showed up at my door unannounced, stopping me from my work in the studio to ask me if I wanted to go out for a cup of coffee, I was thinking of ways of getting rid of him, wondering if I should even open the door. Every time he asked me if I wanted to go out for a cup of coffee, I had always told Carl I was too busy, but he figured I’d change my mind today. I wouldn’t. But I let him in the house, even asked him if he wanted something to drink. We were sitting there at the couch, when one of us edges toward the subject of religion. I didn’t know he was church-going. Twenty years ago, the way the world was heading, you’d think Christianity would be something from the past, but it is stronger than ever now. As forward-moving as my generation sounded back then, we’re going back to what we were, what we had grown up with and had rebelled against, what was familiar. In no uncertain terms, I was telling Carl, I had had it with Christianity, that the only reason my wife takes our daughter to church is so that she could improve her Korean at a Korean Sunday school. If my daughter turned out Christian, I wasn’t going to prevent it, but I certainly was not going to take that path myself. When we were at the door shaking hands and wishing each other a great day, I sensed something in him, as if he sensed something new in me, something that he couldn’t quite work with.

When I first met Carl, I caved in one morning and told him I’d go with him to Starbucks to meet some of his old friends. Carl was trying to introduce me to everyone in those first days in A_____. I did appreciate his enthusiasm, but he was so damn talkative. If the guy was retired, he must have been in his sixties, but he was acting like someone fresh out of high school, recounting all of his great exploits. I thought we were going to talk art, because that was how he had framed the whole thing: “Let’s talk about art!” But he was talking about everything he ever did in his life, regardless if it were not really art, and he never once asked me about where I was coming from. For all he knew, I was a serial killer who dressed in nice shirts and neckties. He didn’t care, as long as he had a pair of ears to get it all and a mouth that only flapped complimentary responses. He needed that like a student going through counseling needed the support. This was not the mind of a man that was in a good place in life. This was someone who didn’t feel good about himself. He had to prove it to others to prove it to himself. He had nothing going, he was always eager to hang out with anyone he could bump into. If you were a retiree, I thought that was the worst place to be because you had nowhere else to go from there. He liked me back then. I could tell. He was always talking to me about everything he did, showing me pictures of school walls he had painted murals on, soccer teams he was coaching, going into June’s house to fetch me some figurine he made back in 1972. That day at the coffee shop with all the other retirees, they were talking about politics, and there were even a couple of reactionary gentlemen espousing the need for the clown who was hijacking the White House at the time. This was not the kind of talk I wanted to get into. When I finally made my goodbyes and I was walking to my car, I promised myself something: I would never step foot in that coffee chain with Carl, even if my life depended on it.

But everybody knew him. When we had our locks changed, the locksmith talked about Carl. When I spoke with someone about his truck, Carl was there to recommend someone for repairs. In essence, Carl was a useful man to have around. He was connected. So, my life may have to depend on it one day, and that was one bridge you probably shouldn’t burn.

Since that religious conversation in my living room, Carl has backed off. He’s still as friendly as ever, but he doesn’t offer anymore personal exploits. He keeps the conversation to the moment: weather and morning plans. I was a great sounding board when he was ripping up the chords of his stories under his air guitar, but that stopped the day I gave him a taste of my opinionated possibilities. Nobody wants to hear what you really have to say. Once they do, they relegate it to not wanting to bend. Although there are others that use what they have to say as a cover for something else, which is what I have always suspected about him. There’s something about him that rubbed me the wrong way since the beginning.

The day we first met him was the Fourth of July when the whole street was cordoned off so the neighborhood families could pop off their fireworks and not worry about outsider cars parking in the neighborhood to see the professional explosions in both cities of C_____ and A_____. He was the neighborhood artist. He was telling us that he was leaving soon, was going to live in Europe. I thought this must have been exciting for him. I wasn’t sure, but he must have been drunk. The next time I bumped into him, I asked him about Europe, and he said that it had to be pushed back. Later, he said he didn’t know when it was going to happen. I stopped asking. After that, it was Thailand, because he owns some land out there, he says. He has a good friend there. He was going to live there for six months. He never went. But every time there was an event, he was the village drunk, slurring his greetings at everyone. I was learning that the friends he had in other countries were all female, and he never made it out to any of those places, even with his apparently romantic aspirations. Then, there was the Korean woman, and she was going back to Korea. And he was going to follow. That was the plan, but it never happened. At the next event, he was drunk again.

It seems like he thrives to chase women around, and he drinks to forget. I don’t think he’s a sexual miscreant or anything like that, but I do think he acts like an adolescent chasing skirts and hollering about his prospects. In Thailand, they call such people butterflies, off after the next flower. He was no more an artist or big traveler than I was a town planner. But he bends backwards to make amends with these women, and from the sounds of it, they don’t want him.

And for a minute, I put myself in his shoes, a guy maybe trying too hard to make something right, somebody with nowhere else to go. Wasn’t I in such a position not too long ago? Or was that sense of the familiar coming back at me because I have a feeling that is where I am going to be heading, because the characteristics that make him that way run parallel to my own?

Really, he just talks too much. Is that a crime? He needs people around him. He has to feel like he’s in the thick of it. He does not talk at all about his personal life. I know he has kids. He never talks about them. He never talks about a past wife or significant other. I just assume he’s divorced. He needs a woman. He’s searching, and he’s hungry for it. His aura confirms this picture. He completes this picture with the body language and the side glances, a piece of commentary that just comes out. But an aura can go deeper, exposing colors beyond that of the visual spectrum to expose feelings, regrets, desires, calculations.

There is a good reason why I can detect it all. How am I able to know so much about someone I hardly ever talk to? Because I was there. Therefore, I am projecting my lesser self onto the structure of his person, not only the way he carries himself but the supernatural odors he’s metaphorically emitting. Could I be wrong about him? There’s a good chance that I am not. We readily recognize those qualities in others that we have successfully hidden in ourselves. If I were not married in this stage in my life, I would be just like him, but less obvious, I believe. He’s tearing up the neighborhood with his friendliness, cuing in everybody on his insecurities and all the rest of the ugly stuff, and I don’t think he even so much as suspects.

But like I said, I could be seeing this because I was there. It could be that many of our neighbors don’t know this about him because they were never that hungry for the same things. They might just think he’s a little strange.

And maybe he’s just being neighborly. That is what it’s supposed to be on the surface. I wish he finds that girl he needs to find and moves on already. He might get busy finally, doing something productive rather than hawking people all the time.

I’m being hard on him. I’ll wipe away every oblique thought I’ve had of the guy and put my trust in him. Outside the bad feeling he gave me at first, he had never given me reason to doubt his intentions. And so, these crossed comments against him are saying more about me than about him. The only thing I can criticize him about is the response to the crooner. Carl having introduced himself to me as an artist, he made me believe that he was one, on some level. And an intrepid artist should know better than to endorse selling out. You can choose to sell out on your own by doing work you think others would like (by bending to public approval), even if in your heart, you do not care for such a direction. I know I have tried that course several times in my life and every single time with the result of failure. But you can never criticize another artist for not doing it. That would just mean you are deeper in the machinery of the flock mentality than the average citizen. Like I’m excusing Carl for every other thing, I am going to excuse him for this, because just like I conclude that he is not a freak or a desperate pervert, I now know beyond all doubt he is not an artist.

When I see the car there with the Florida plate in front of June’s house, I think of the Miami guy. He’s not going to make it out here. He won’t bend. And that means he won’t break because of others, although this is no guarantee against coming to pieces all by yourself.

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The Spaces between the Idiomatic Expressions

25 October 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I don’t give too much thought to the one that goes, “He has no imagination.” Nobody uses it anymore, but I find myself using it a lot these days. Did I finally crack the code?

When I listen to somebody saying something, and they tell me through their words that they are not really thinking around the problem, it tells me they are not using their imagination. It’s the words that have been repeated by them and everybody else that arrive at saying nothing. Certain phrases and expressions come and go, but using your imagination is never going to go out of style, right? Because, I think, imagination is the interior agency of an individual going outside the prescribed points of contact in a situation and investigating what unseen agency may be affecting the situation.

The problem is really the words. They fail to hit the nail on the head, to hit a grand slam homer — always pulling the cat out of the bag, testing the waters, putting one over on you, having its cake and eating it too. There you have it. Popular expressions are hands down looking to be clear as a bell, but they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. All of this goes without saying, but don’t shoot the messenger.

Language, as an applied form of communication, has such a limited range of options. If it needs to be clear, that means it cannot be pliable. I remember when it was popular for people to say “thinking outside the box.” It meant something back then. The funny part was that every time you said it, you were doing exactly the opposite of what it was for. I woke up one day, and suddenly people were using it. What was surprising to me was that I had just made this raw drawing that had a square-like center, and in the middle of that inked room, I brushed in bold, ugly letters, “My life is a fucking box!”

I thought it meant the same thing. I was living in a prison in those days because I was stuck in a job and relegated to an apartment on the off hours, and I hated everything about it. It was a limited life, and when people started using that expression, I looked at it as a form of byproduct that comes from a limited life. What sounded like people exercising low levels of imagination was symptomatic for the quality of the lives themselves, and I was turning just as robotic as the masses because of my limited means, the limited connections that were available to me.

At a company meeting, somebody would say, “Now that’s thinking outside the box,” and I would groan, wondering at what point I was going to lose every little particle of creative substance I had left by such close proximity to this sort of exchange.

How much of this does it take for you to lose your imagination? Living in a box could sap you of everything you held dear in life, because what was life without imagination? I never thought I could merely exist and do what everyone else was doing. It was never part of the plan.

That was why when I used to hear the much older expression, “So-and-so has no imagination.” I would be unclear about what was meant. Not exactly sure how that applied to the particular situation that caused such a verdict on that person, I was convinced that the person was stricken with some deformity. It was one of the lowest things you can call anyone, and I always failed to find the situation in question proof positive that they had this ailment. No, it was never clear to me, but I noticed that such a reaction to someone usually came when the targeted person was not in league with your ideas, and nothing more. To me, it was becoming a question of not just the person who purportedly lacked imagination but of the person responsible for the observation.

People still use that outdated expression, and I wonder if they know what they mean by it. I think it is usually meant for someone who doesn’t think outside the box. I don’t think I know anymore.

Did it mean something before and now the meaning is lost because the times have changed and we don’t think under those limitations anymore? The old generation is no longer around to explain it to us.

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The Poets

18 October 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The lives of today’s poets will be forgotten. I can’t think of a handful of names that have made it through the 20th century, people whose lives will be known by a small throng of others who bask in the light of rarified thoughts, eagerly seeking transient miscellanea of the most esoteric and mind-flowering sort — that of a poet, clearly.

I wish it were not so, but if I ever not make it in all the other creative career paths that have haunted me, I will then become a lyric poet who is only concerned with the day-to-day, and I will live my life for myself and my thoughts, and when I die, I will leave behind a sordid life that the world shaped for me, through my own physical (ergo, economic) limitations.

It will be humorous to plumb the trite passerby day-to-day of my life — what I disliked and what I was unreasonable about. How fascinating — how my life lit up the moment I had found my arch nemesis over a fender-bender the guy was willing to go to court for, and how I plotted to kill him, to perform that fictional inanity, the perfect crime. How my life shot through circumstance upon circumstance beyond my will not like voluntary breathing but like the unstoppable beating of my heart, and how it was released into a chamber that held only my volition.

How I was given no choice, how the world was not made for such thought, and how it still makes room for it somehow.

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When They Don’t Rhyme

11 October 2020 by Rey Armenteros

We were getting work done on the house we had just bought. I would talk to the various contractors for repiping, for windows, for shutters, and every time they asked me for a decision about color or placement, I would tell them I had to talk to my wife about it, along with the price and details and such. And they would make that face and say they understood because “happy wife, happy life.”

When I heard it enough times, I recollected a few thoughts on rhyme poetry during the early days of Modern English, when they were still contributing to the construction of the language we now know. This book was mentioning the power of rhyme when you were trying to place two ideas on the same footing. When words rhymed, it was to accentuate a connection they shared. I had never thought of that before, how in rhyming poetry, you could (and perhaps should) consider the words that are rhyming and their relationships within the wider canvas of stanzas and other words. I liked the idea, but the example of wife and life the book used could clearly not be used today without sounding hackneyed. The fact that those words rhyme give nothing if not that they happen to rhyme in English. What could have been a profound discovery four hundred years ago becomes nothing but a circumstance today, and the connections between the meaning of your life and how it is allied with a person you would call wife could no longer float.

This life-wife poetry is skipping across the surface of reality to make the fasteners that hold them together nothing more than incidental to a language. Perfect rhyme in old western poetry can mean one thing — and that is a strong binding; whereas slant rhyme might give us a slightly skewed meaning. But if the words you intend do not happen to rhyme — what then?

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The Longest Drive (first published in Birmingham Arts Journal)

04 October 2020 by Rey Armenteros

A path that has no other light but the coiled spring inside of us.

Sometime ago, we became such a light. The car under our seated forms supplied the casing that housed an independent battery, keeping our momentum constant but slow-burning!

With the cabin lights on, we were a roving lantern. We were an arching beacon, going forward and onward. We were snapping our fingers then. When. Now. Suddenly. A madman jumped in front of us. We veered off and went over a cliff and into a starry night.

For a moment, we became part of the greater light, another pinprick in the brilliant sky. In that moment, we didn’t descend. We didn’t say a thing, letting the radio go.

We broke the sound barrier. Our speed melted the tuning knobs. We lived in that car and fell into the celestial groups that rose in key to our own climb.

Until the canyons came up to curtain all windows, to tile all the doors.

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