A fluorescent pink line rhapsody

This may have been communist Cuba, but that night was pure old-world Havana. It was a night made for men like Meyer Lansky or Michael Corleone. The legendary Buena Vista Social Club was playing at the even more legendary Club Tropicana. Sitting towards the back of the club so they could talk, Paul and several friends sat, cigars and mojitos never far away. There was Raúl Santos Canosa, a Cuban he had met while at a conference in Berlin, and the very reason he was there in the first place. Some of Canosa's friends came along as well, the former beauty pageant winner Marisela Rodriguez Guzmán, her equally beautiful sister Joanna, and two other men whose names Paul lost in the night.

The womens' perfume blended gently with the cigar smoke and a faint ocean breeze. Aside from Raúl, he had just met these people this evening, yet he knew they were his friends. If their laughter, smiles and alcohol-induced bliss was false, then Paul could safely assume that these Cubans were the finest actors the world had ever seen. Then Paul realized something: this sensation of bliss, of being completely in the moment, was the most satisfying, overwhelming feeling he had known. To be in such perfect surroundings, with such wonderful people who appreciated him as much as he did them, there was simply no equivalent. What more could a man ask for, rather than to live in the present? The phone rang.

"Hello?"
"Yo, Paul, there's a Sandra from Courland Communications on Line 3 for you."
"OK, did you ask her what she wants?" He could still feel the ocean breeze. It appeared that someone had left the fan on.
"Um, no. She was talking really fast. Said something about a press release, though."
Paul put his head in his left hand. Who hires these people, anyway?
"Will, I know you've only been working here for a month or so, but I'm sure you've realized that we release at least 50 press releases each day. You didn't bother to ask which one?"
"No, I'll ask her."
"Don't worry about it, just put her through. Next time someone calls, though, remember to ask."

Paul waited for a moment. Poor kid probably had no idea how to use the phone. "Sandra", as it turned out, was a Minneapolis-based secretary for a public relations firm of seeking a press release on an Obama campaign rally in that state. No problem, sweetheart, he wanted to say. Instead, he said he would e-mail it to her immediately, and included a bit about how she had to reply with a list of which publications she sent it to. Bureaucracy was so exciting, he didn't know what to do with himself.
As soon as she hung up, Paul closed his eyes in vain, trying to go back to Havana. This is how he spent the majority of the day: dreaming of places he'd never been to, of lives he'd never lived, things he had never done. The joy of being away for just a few short minutes made the rest of the day almost bearable. The problem with this kind of fantasy, however, was that it was likely much more appealing in his head than in real life. It was like the time he started dating the girl he had dreamed of dating for years. He almost immediately lost his desire for her, and needless to say, the relationship went directly to hell. The phone rang again.

"Hey Paul, Cindy's going on a Starbucks run. You want anything?"
"No, I'm good. Tell her thank you, though."

He wasn't even sure who had called. He could never tell their voices apart on the phone. The clock on his desk indicated that he had arrived at work two hours before. This was distressing, as it meant that there were seven left. He had no urgent need to go, but he got up and went to the bathroom anyways. He went up to the urinal next to the one the boss of the firm, Glen Vyshinski, was using.

Glen was a large man in almost every sense of the word. It was clear that he had a very healthy appetite, but he was also incredibly muscular. If it wasn't for his signature Armani suit, he might look like a bouncer at a nightclub. Glen had made a fortune in the PR business years before, and had moved to open his own firm. Although he ran the place like a colonel, Glen did have a good sense of humor. He particularly loved April Fool's Day, when he got a friend to dress up like a police officer and pretend to arrest him on charges of obstruction of justice. The employees all had a good laugh about that. He looked up from the urinal.

"Hey Paul, how are you?"
"Doing well, Glen, how's everything?"
"Pretty good. Say, listen, I need someone to enter some numbers onto the server for our clients from Dallas, and I just can't get my head around that new guy, Charles, is it?"
"Actually, his name is Will. Not such a bad guy. Needs a little time to get used to things, though. Do you need me to do the data entry?"
"Yeah, Paul, I know it's a hassle, but I was hoping you wouldn't mind. It's really important, and hopefully it won't take too long. I'll forward it to you when I get back to my desk." By now the both of them had made it to the sink, having flushed almost in unison.
"Sounds great. I will get that out to you as soon as I can." Glen just nodded and left the bathroom. If there was one thing, excuse the pun, that pissed Paul off more than anything else, it had to be the casual urinal chat. How do some men think its possible to have a normal conversation with their privates exposed? Normally, if a man goes into the bathroom, he'll notice every single man at the urinal looking straight up. There has to be some psychological explanation of this, because from what he had heard, women behaved in a completely different way.

Nevertheless, he went back to his cubicle, or as he preferred to call it, his "dominion". It was one of the few places where he had any sense of control, the other being his miniscule studio apartment.

Unfortunately, this dominion did not extend to his computer. Glen Vyshinski’s data set was enormous, and it kept Paul busy for the next several hours. He worked tirelessly, aimlessly, mindlessly, paying little attention to the numbers that he was putting in. At 1 pm, three hours after he had began, he finally entered the last number into the server.

“I swear to God, I’m going to get carpel tunnel here,” he said to no one in particular.

Just then, Ryan, the firm’s accountant and Paul’s friend, tapped him on the shoulder. Save for the facial hair, Ryan looked something like a little boy, his blonde whiskers erratically spouting out like he had just started puberty.

“Hey man, want to grab a bite?” he said.
“Nah, thanks man. I got a date.”
“Oh, awesome. Damn, I need to find a girl… Who is she?”
“I met her at the zoo this weekend. She works near here, so we agreed to go on a Chipotle date.”
“That’s cool, man. I was at a party last week, and I thought this girl was totally into me, but then she left with some douchebag… Ah well, let me know if she has any cute single friends.”
“Will do, man. I’ll see you later.”

This was not entirely untrue. Paul had, in fact, scheduled a Chipotle date with a girl, but he hadn’t met her at the zoo. He’d never even been to the zoo. And Ryan hadn’t figured out that there was no reason for anyone to be there by himself on a weekend. In Paul’s book, weekends were reserved for intoxication. The girl in question was a certain Marissa Gustafsson, and they had been exchanging e-mails via the Craigslist singles section. Paid services like eHarmony or match.com had turned him down, saying that he was incompatible with anybody. But he’d already figured that out, which is why he had finally resorted to seeking out dates on the internet.

They were supposed to meet at 1:45, so he headed down to the mass that was Clark Street. The street was incredibly imposing. Here he was, a Jon Arbuckle in the midst of Brad Pitts and Paris Hiltons, a dark stain on the golden stage. Apparently, being successful professionally implied physical beauty as well. It wasn’t that he was a bad looking man, but he was definitely nothing compared to these “Sex and the City” types. At twenty-seven, Paul was already losing noticeable quantities of hair, and a poor diet and active party life in college had given him a gut that never quite subsided. Still, he had prepared for this day as best he could, and approached the restaurant nervously.

He saw a brown haired girl.
“Excuse me, are you Marissa?”
“No, sorry, I’m meeting someone else.”
After several interactions with more brown-haired women, Paul became very frustrated and very hungry. Women are all the same, he thought. They all want to play head games, and I’m about done with this. She hadn’t provided a phone number, just a picture that may or may not have been real. His frustration mounting, he asked a passerby for a cigarette and smoked it. Thirty minutes later, his hands were shaking, and he was sure that his face was turning red.

“Fuck it,” he said out loud, and walked into Chipotle. The line was almost done by this point in the afternoon, so he stepped up right to the counter.
“Let me get two steak burritos, guacamole and extra sour cream.” After paying, it was only five minutes before they were both gone.

He spent the subsequent hours doing nothing in particular, other than reading articles on the internet about who knew what. Ryan wasn’t there, and no one else spoke to him. It was a quiet, yet humbling place to work. Finally, at 6 pm, he grabbed his briefcase and walked out towards the elevator. The office was already empty.

Once again, he was back on the street, dreaming of Havana, of love, of key lime pie and palm trees. Inevitably, he began to remember Christine. He remembered walking with her along the lakefront, watching the sunrise on the North Avenue pier. He remembered seeing her for the first time, drunker than he was at the Funky Buddha on Grand Avenue, and how one thing had led to another that night.

These thoughts caused him to smile a bit, but, as it generally does, forward-moving chronology wiped it all away. She had left him several years before, on one of those balmy, windy nights so unique to Chicago. He had been en route to her West Loop apartment, dressed in a suit that he would never wear again. Paul remembered opening the door and seeing the distressed look on her face. It was right there that she essentially decapitated him, took away his reason for waking up in the morning. Entering meaningless numbers had been much more enjoyable when there was something to look forward to. He walked all the way home to 18th street, then proceeded to consume an entire bottle of apple schnapps in an hours.

The following day, Paul remembered waking up still half-drunk, then stumbling to the balcony. Everything looked exactly as it had the day before, and yet it was completely changed. The air no longer tasted the same, and he got no joy from watching commuters walking to catch the L. The sun, once a joy, now just made him recoil. No one he was close to had ever died, but he imagined this is what that felt like.
This particular afternoon, as he walked down Van Buren Street in search of a new bar, he suddenly decided to go see a movie. He called Felipe, his friend from college who now waited tables, to see if he wanted to join him.

“Hey, wanna go to a movie at McClurg?”
“Now? What movie?”
“I don’t really care. Whatever’s there. I’m just close to McClurg.”
“I would, but I’m at the Blue Island courthouse, I’m contesting a parking ticket down here. Fuckers said I had no plates, but my front one was just a little bent.” Paul had to chuckle at that. This guy always found a way to get himself into the most ridiculous situations imaginable, such as getting a date with a woman who was sitting in the car next to him at a red light.
“All right, man. Well, good luck with that.”
He hung up and continued walking The McClurg Court was several blocks away east of Michigan Avenue. Even though it was November, it was a balmy afternoon, and it looked like it might rain, just like that fateful night several years before. People often said that time could heal anything, but he was starting to lose faith in this assessment.

After arriving at the movie theater, he saw that the only movie still playing was “National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets.” Although he personally could not stand Nicholas Cage’s face, he still paid the nine dollars for a ticket. In other times, he would have never gone to see a movie by himself. But for better or for worse, those days were now over.

Predictably, he hated the movie. Nicholas Cage was embroiled in some pathetic plot to link Thomas Jefferson to the ancient Egyptians. If anyone should be attempting to do that, it should have been a distinguished academic, not this excuse for an actor. As the movie ended, he decided to sit for a while. Everyone left, and the credits continued to play.

Suddenly, they ended, and Paul was left in complete darkness. He savored the moment. For despite his loneliness, pure silence and isolation was hard to come by in a place like Chicago. Always somebody screwing around. How poetic it would have been if his true love had sat next to him at that moment. He didn’t know if it had been Christine, or if it was someone else. He always told himself he would die searching, but you could never be sure exactly when that moment of finality would occur. Paul sat there for several minutes in the darkness, loving it and hating it at the same time. But as happened with most things in this city, he was interrupted.
“Excuse me, sir. You need to leave. The next movie is starting in ten minutes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Must have dozed off.”

Back on Van Buren Street, the grayness of daytime had given way to the purity of the night. Night was that time that was considered off limits by most people his age, but he loved the emptiness. For some reason, he had a pain in his foot, so he decided not to make the three hour walk back to 18th street, opting to take the Pink Line home instead. The El was a fascinating place to him. There was misery and hope, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful, all thrown into one smelly, un-air conditioned, slow-moving locomotive. He often liked to take a guess as to what people were thinking. There was a thirty-something woman dressed in a pantsuit, looking aimlessly into the dark tunnel. There was a Hispanic woman wearing a nylon jacket with two children. The pain in her eyes reflected woes he could only begin to imagine. He often wondered where he would fit into this anonymous, urban melodrama. Before long, the intercom announced that 18th street would be the next stop.

This public transportation system had so much character. The heat, stench of urine, and amateur musicians gave the El a very similar feel to the New York subway. However, no matter the time of day, the commotion was always less severe here than in the New York. This is not to say that there was no commotion. There was plenty, and to prove it, the police were handcuffing two men who lay down on the floor. Paul was sorry he’d missed the chase.

He ascended back into the night. Just a few blocks away down 18th, and he would be at home. Just past Ashland Avenue, some local youths sitting on the curb stared at him.

Paul did the predictable yuppie manuever and accelerated a little bit, as his apartment was just a few blocks down, on Racine. He breathed a sigh of relief in the lobby, happy that he had made it home. “Home”, of course, seemed to be a bit of an overstatement. Too many pizza boxes and beer cans to give it that welcoming atmosphere. But why would he complain? The rent was rock-bottom.

The answering machine yielded no messages, and the only relevant e-mail was an ad for a singles’ night in the basement of a north side Korean church up on Foster. He would join the withering old men, the divorcees, and the other young men like him. Happiness, despite the fact that he could not define it, still seemed attainable on some level. The problem, Paul believed, was with semantics. You can’t have something you can’t define.

He found some left-over pork Lo Mein, and consumed it rapidly. After this, he was on the internet for some time, chatting with friends from old times, looking for friends in the present. At about 11 pm, he decided to take his nightly dose of Benadryl. It was time to sleep.

In several hours, his alarm would ring, telling him it was time to wake up. An hour later, the bell on the El would ring. And all day after that, the telephones would ring, each sound as meaningless as the next. As the great hip-hop artist Immortal Technique once said, the story ends without a sequel. Because for Paul the everyman, and anyone else who could claim that title, the story ends and begins at the same place. Over and over again. The cold, logical pattern of his exterior life made sense only in the context of economics. Unfortunately, the human mind is much too complex to be explained by this rather simplistic model. Perhaps there was another. The day ends, another begins. And outside, a fire truck blared by.

An Ode to Unthahorsten

This, our vision, our very land
O, if only man could see
How very little he understands
and O how grand is He

The naked eye, limited by sight
A mere dance around eternity
The mere glimpse offered by the night
An ultimate, boundless boundary

That Grand Masterpiece, Creation
The never-ending Symphony
For all of man’s jubilation
For all his deserved agony

A droplet in the cosmic ocean
Forever seeking Zion

Consider

Consider for a moment, a man's paralysis
As he ponders this endless night
With all its layers and its bareness
Consider, then, his flight

Long ago, in a scorched land
He had been forgotten by the sun
No more of this heat, could he withstand
Now he roams, forever on the run

There is no past, no future, only this moment
A present that, despite his eyes, is still a fantasy
Through these plains he walks, Fate's lost agent
Perhaps, one day, he will be able to see

Consider, then, eternity
Consider, then, Man's tenacity

... And on the ground, a soldier

My brown eyes turned to face the field
The death was all around us
Those poor young men, they would not yield
Our boots, now stained with crimson
And through the howls, the limbs, I saw
Lucifer take his vengenance
The rain slowly began to fall
... Upon those fallen Soldiers

Upon the long siege's end,
I saw a man, I knew him
T'was not his death, It was relief
Into God's hands he landed
Through ten bullets, this young man fell
But what could be the Reason?
The soft wind brought the stench of Death
... Above the fallen Soldiers

For those who live to tell the tale
No glory, no joy, no victory
When one has walked green fields turned red
The field where a generation bled
Don't look up now, God cleanses us
Of redness and of glory
And then I cried and felt the Shame,
... And on the ground, a Soldier

A statement on faith and religion

This was originally addressed to friends of mine on www.facebook.com. I'd now like to post it here for the general public to see. Spanish version to come soon.

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This note concerns itself with the concept of faith as its entered my life. As some, but not all of you, now know, I have decided to let religion become a part of who I am. While this may be puzzling to some, it seems rational for me to explain myself. The reason I tagged all of you is because in ways large and small, every single one of you has had a meaningful impact in my life. You are all important to me, and I can't emphasize that enough. Some of you I've lost touch with, but as I've come to realize, that doesn't really matter: your true friends are not true because you talk to them all the time, but because in a time of need, they will be there for you, and you for them.

First, I would like to discuss the way in which I came to accept these ideas into my life. My parents, good people that they are, raised me as an atheist after they had escaped from the evils of Franco's Catholic dictatorship in Spain. I don't blame them at all, and in fact I would go so far as to say that had I been in their position, I would have done the same. Through my youth, I was told of the repressive actions on the part of so-called Christians that forced a perverted form of this beautiful faith down the throats of an entire generation of Spaniards. In that environment, it is not difficult to see why people would turn against the Church, as it no longer represented a viable path for a bright, sustainable future.

The kind of zealotry practiced by these Spanish "Catholics", I believe, goes completely against what Jesus Christ preached. Throughout the Gospels, though my knowledge of them is admittedly limited, we see in him a figure who preached brotherhood and love above all else. Those who ignore those tenets forsake, in my opinion, the right to be called Christians.

I, on the other hand, was presented with no such repression. I grew up enjoying the freedoms and liberties upon which this great nation was founded. I remember accepting my parents' beliefs as a child, gradually changing over time. While the atheist claims to approach the world with a scientific method, he fails to realize that his ultimate conclusions, while perhaps more methodological, are as much a leap of faith as an absolute faith that God DOES exist.

The essential question here is, of course, how one can be religious without being completely certain in the existence of God. The answer is perhaps more simple than meets the eye: faith. It is universal to all humans, religious or not. The easy, conventional assumption is to brand faith as something tied inseparably to religion. It's not the case. For those of you in a relationship, think of the love you and your partner have for one another. You see its manifestations, but you do not see the love itself. It is an abstract concept, and our belief in it is what keeps it strong. The economy is another example. From a material point of view, it is non-existent. And yet it is everywhere in our lives, affecting everything we do, as this latest crisis is showing us. My point is, as the Reverend at my church said yesterday, that every human, religious or not, has faith in a better state of affairs. We all have a vision of our lives as they should be, rather than as they are.

That said, faith in God is not so different. We don't see God, and yet His impact in every society around the world is impossible to deny. The most fascinating aspect about this notion about God is that whether or not He in fact exists, He continues to influence and, in many cases, shape the world in which we live, for better and for worse.

The prevalence of religion throughout the world is another fascinating topic, and it deals with the basic human inability to explain not only the natural world, but our ultimate origins. My own belief is that such questions are beyond the scope of the human mind, our most powerful tool. After a recent conversation with an atheist friend of mine, he put forth an interesting analogy: early in human history, people were unable to explain why thunder came from the sky. These were people who could never dream that such a mystery could ever be solved in human history. And yet today, here we stand, with a simple textbook definition on how and why lightning and thunder occur. Logically, my friend argued, the same thing will one day happen with explaining the origins of the universe.

Perhaps science will accomplish this goal one day in the very distant future. My own belief, however, is that it is not meant to be. Whereas the quest to discover the causes of thunder and lightning was caused by an observation of an apparently inexplicable phenomenon, the causes of our own origins include no such observations. In short, we have no clue, no hypothesis, and no methods to solve the mystery as to why we are here. We simply are. Any speculation into our origins, whether scientific or religious, is a leap of faith.

That said, my belief is that the goal of religion should be less about explaining the origins of the universe, of the Earth, and of Humanity, but rather to provide an inner strength to each and every human being. I first went to church a few weeks ago not to solve these mysteries, but to realize the truth that God resides within each and every one of us, just as love or the economy might. The Christian faith I've seen in these few weeks is one about individual development, about love for your neighbors, and above all, about finding a path to a better life. In my life I have met people who I have considered to be true Christians, whom I respected deeply even before my own foray into faith. These were people whose faith was solid that it absolutely completed their lives. This is not because they have the answers to the origins of the universe (because they don't), but because emotionally, religion had filled a gap that very few people on this earth, even religious ones, have managed to seal. These are the people who I seek to emulate. It is this completeness that I seek, in my own way, as we all should.

Amen.