The New System

[After weeks of being obsessed with photographs, I decided to write again. This doesn't quite work, though I like the idea of riffing/rifling through terms like "anger management," for their conflation of emotion with business hierarchies. The management company is everywhere, and our blades of grass are not free from it, nor are our parking lots, where leaf blowers make their correspondent breezes a pain in the ass.]

 2/15/22

Not much can be cured, but there’s a lot of management. We’re lower tier workers—not in the German sense, but perhaps so—caught in a bureaucratic grid of someone else’s devising. Our managers, ourselves. Our bodies, not so much. There are offices for anger and personnel; everyone’s encouraged to have skills. Skill sets, not null ones. Buoyant with templates, methods like wood blocks pressed into watermarked stationery. You can get a job, find a path, manage your desires and ambitions. Just find the right app, or aptitude. Attitude’s a word like hipster that has no definition, just a sigh of disdain after it’s pronounced. I now pronounce you word and deed. The wedding photographer trails your every first step into a marriage you will do your best to contain. To be a woman is to half slip away from the word, begin to undress it, take off at least one syllable, the better to manage your tan. Damn vortex, chaos inside its confined space. The best translation ends with the word “kerplunk.” Not a household word, but it works well for frogs leaping into water pools. The pond’s a containment system, finely managed, though its history remains obscure. Before Thoreau, a freed slave lived on that land, his solitude another thing indeed, his only freedom bought, not chosen. Self-consuming. Signed, sealed, delivered. Across Kalakaua, a white woman in shorts gyrated beside a small speaker. She was singing, but the sound took time to cross the street, arrive at us and the Black man who laughed when I recongized “Superstition!” She worked hard at it, harder than the man with a “Want Wife” sign who muttered something about the Jews killing his grandfather, on another corner. In the country, there you feel free. But Waikiki wants you, like an Uncle Sam with hand outstretched, promising a vacation within the military industrial complex, where tourists get the good water and the right to complain no one smiles their way. A maid brought a bucket of cold water for my father’s sunburned feet. We ate at the military hotel, where Hawaiian royalty marched across the walls. I’m sure you can find a good history manicure here somewhere, with an immigrant to paint your nails after you’ve walked them across so many sidewalks to the ocean, through alleys of surf-boards, past the charred reminder of a recent arson. I find a syringe near my house. Pain management’s the next boom. Lower it carefully.