Fortunately for Donkay, Satie Puzza don't stop, she don't quit. Satie is what some of the oldguard would succintly dub a "get-go", whilst they eat duck pate and sip ginger beer. She became a favourite over at 1430 after her Greyhound Bus/Convention Center tour one summer a while back, whereby the gal, low-and-behold, reported from a dozen or so sadly attended trade show weekends in the American industrial North Middle-West. Among other gems, her sonnet series distinguishing an art from a craft is priceless, and lodged somewhere in Donkay's halls, resting. She has since earliest membership prefered the ways of the coach bus to other methods of getting somewhere.
it dont seem right for them to bring on that clear-paper-wrapped food which kinda looks like a slice of pizza but not and, what's she doing? putting her can of coke on the overhead luggage space? does she even notice? forget it, what's with this chick looking like that G.I. Windchill but could beBlizzard but damnit which one is it, the one who skies everywhere. Jimmy got drunk last night, my last night in town of course, and spent all nite talkin to Kevin and Barb about the alliance between the G.I. team and "that Blanka crew" he kept calling 'em. the one with the red beard, the skier. but i guess it really happend because later, in a softer moment Jimmy's breath slowed and his gruff whisky hoarse protestations simmered to a molassass plea to get in my pants, and when i was just trying to keep him from passing out, i made him explain to me what he had to personally gain from the newly recognized 8 Joe Allies from Capcom Street Fighter II. guess it's just a symbolic brotherhood and the two groups wouldn't ever even engage the same enemy, being that the internationally recognized "enemy of my enemy is my friend" standard is defunct, and presumably Joe never even talked to heads like Dhalsim, so its really a rubber stamp arrangement to boost civilian morale, or so said Jimmy before trailing off and just repeatin the phrase "karate bombs" like ten times until he was snorin. sounded like "carte blanche" by the end. whatever. lookit this chick and her mink helmet, which isn't even connected to that whitewolf three quarter coat piece. she totally forgot the coke. how many layers of clothes is she going to take off, omygod she got a tribal right above her ass crack. this chick will not remember the coke, this is classic. Jimmy read me a poem that had a line about this dude's "trajectory of exquisite proportion" which is just about how i'd describe the placement of this coke can, like two feet behind the chick's boyfriend in the second to last row. this is better than on demand, im in the middle of the last row, the three seated ones with the chick there on my right preoccupied by that seasame looking pizza slice and some white afroed dude against the window playin with the emergency exit handle like he's badd cuz he got some pristine seat, which he did, i'd admit. the bus is about to start and when it lurches forward towards the Bowery the can could do one of somemany promising things. please let it. i want it to fall and roll, sending measured swirling rivulets of soda onto Boyfriend and the many heads in rows ahead of him. a straight fall would suffice, dumping the entire contents all over his rat's nest hipster hair and ginger beard face. but then what is this afroed freak doing now, leaning on me, and in that last moment before the bus rocks forward and back again, before going forward, the afroee is in front of my face looking at the can saying to it, "you are leaving that coke there?" and the fur chick is up and startled so shes saying a couple things at once about eating and forgetting and she grabs it like an instant before it lost its equalibrium and this guy leans back into his space against the window which is getting the sun and looks warm, and hes lookinacting like he didnt even say anything. just when im thru getting bent up because nothin went down and right before i decided to lift this note onta my pad, the dude leans over again and this time looks at me with this angular scarred up face and says real quiet, "Dorn says if you have a name you can be sold." whatever.
There is no racism at DonKay, and that's because we get entries like this every day. There is just nothing to hide behind when you have everybody's private thoughts laying around in notebooks and napkins, their quiet confessions between themselves and paper. This is why we labour, and in obscurity as well, because we are working at a pretty sweet level of self-representation. For instance there is the self-rep of the usual blog, which is self-to-world and is in gerenral worse than talking to someone face-to-face. But DonKay shit, baby, is self-rep that's self-talking-to-self, with varying degrees of the world kept in mind. This is why Donkee archivists are so angry with 1430's project, trying to shut us down and seize our file cabinets and making failed attempts to persuade our delivery man to allow poison put into our Chinese food (gotcha bitches! They ain't YO new good friends.) They think we are breaking the trust of our members. But really we are just putting that trust on display. For instance, Kevin Pulosky finished high school in the late 80's, 3 years after this post, and seems like a nice enough guy.
The second year in a row that we take our big class field trip to a hospital in Saint Louis, and second year in a row that we stop in the same restaurant in southern Illinois, which is southern for real if you hear the way that people talk. Anyway this place is probably the weirdest place ever. Not to sound bad but I think that it is a place mostly for black people, especially at night when it is also a dance place. During the day it is huge and half of the tables and couches are empty except when our whole grade shows up.
Anyway just like last year I made a big mess of ordering. There is plexiglass between you and the people working there just like a bank, and it's yellow with age and grease, the white light shining from the signs above their heads and it seems hard for them to hear you. I first asked just for three big things of fries; I thought it would be easy and cheap. But then I remembered that they have other good things like fried fish, which I could see there in the tub of oil with bubbles all around it. The cashier had a funny policy with the money. Pete right in front of me ordered a hot dog and two fries, and gave some money over, but then the cashier, when all his food was ready just gave him one fries and some of his money back instead of saying before that he didn’t have enough. I gave Pete some change and then the guy gave him his second fries, but then the same thing happened with me when I tried to change to a fish sandwich. I hate myself when I try to order, especially when the person talks different than me, for some reason I always change my own voice, trying to sound clear I guess, but I end up talking like an old man from like England, loud and slow but tortured in some way that makes it impossible to understand. I mean, I asked for a fried fish sandwhich, and the guy gave me a little travel box of Kellogg’s All-Star cereal and a carton of milk. I didn’t even know if he was insulting me or making fun of me or if our miscommunication was that huge, but I just took it, thinking I could save it for later on the bus ride.
Once you get past the little room with the food counter there you turn into the huge dance-floor restaurant part of the place. As I said there are couches and tables and there was even rap music playing. Some of the stupid guys from class who had already eaten were dancing in a stupid way to the music, making fun of it. Me and Pete said that those guys needed their asses kicked. We walked up some stairs onto wooden balcony and found a lot of half empty couches there, and there was also people not from our school.
Me, Derrick and Pete sat there, and Derrick started talking to this guy that didn’t seem much older than us. He was friendly but a little scary too, his eyes were all wet like he was constantly misty eyed about the world, and he talked really like poetically too about things as if it was all a mystery. Soon he was asking us if we knew how to dance to this kind of music. We said sort of, that at least we watched MTV and sometimes danced it with our friends. Somehow at this moment it was me that was talking to him and our eyes were kind of locked and so when he got up and started demonstrating the way to dance I saw that it was something that maybe I could do ok so somehow I found myself getting up and trying to dance with him.
I can admit that the dancing looked a little like fighting just in the way we were pumping our hands, but there was no way it could be thought we were actually fighting, but suddenly this guy who works there, who surprisingly was white and had a microphone on his ear came up to us and said that there was no dancing on the balcony. Then some girl not from my school but like greek or something got up and acted all traumatized and said that the last time she came up here some one dancing accidentally punched her in the head when she was sitting there and she was like going to faint from remembering and it was all a fiasco of people surrounding her and the guy disappeared. I sat back down with Derrick and Pete and said, see what happens? Whenever I try to do something that’s out there, things get fucked up. Its like god punishes me and is making me the way I am. They just looked at me like they didn’t know what to believe.
It's rare, but for our dreams, that DonKay dances cheek-to-cheek with the stars. Rarer still that we're able to find any such occasion when we or our contributors have covered ourselves in glory -- or even wispy shreds of dignity -- in our brief brush with la fama. So we normally despise that type of shit, if only to save ourselves from embarrassment. But these arable archivist lands yield the odd paradigmatic peach, sweet and juicy like yam sugar. And we like to share. Gemelo Hernandez was one of 40,000 or so Puerto Ricans living in New York City's Spanish Harlem, circa 1930, but the first one on our shop rolls who submitted in the language of his newly chosen land. Federico García Lorca, a poet, lived across town for about 9 months.
He also, we believe, gave Gemelo the sheaves of rice paper upon which his entries were written, here excerpted. And this was after FGL called New York, "Senegal, with machines."
Was yesterday that Señor came down to the basement to leave me his hamburguesa for lunch. He says that they disgust him, at any time of day. Maybe it is the pickles. I do not know what he is eating instead. Maybe he eats just the salad. Again, I do not know for sure. Luz is very disappointed. It is like being slapped in the face finding a meal that has only been disordered, she says.
I was not there to receive it from him. When I returned from the waxing of the floor of the ballroom, there was only the cold beef and a note, "Para Ti, Niño." I did not eat the sandwich right away, but I hid it in the back of Luz's re-frigerator for when I become hungry tomorrow. That is after I have cleaned the stairs, which takes many hours of the afternoon.
Señor tells me that I remind him of a friend of his from España. I do not know who he is talking about, though. He tells me that is why he is in search of me all of the time when I am at work in the building. To bring him home, away, he says. I do not think he likes it en la Casa very much. Also he asks much about Puerto Rico. So I tell him what I know. But I do not know how he can write if he does not eat and spends all his time looking for the janitor.
DonKay doesn't advocate antisocialism, at least not any more than NASCAR advocates starting your day with two bloody marys, draining its length as if its light were light beer, and then taking the sun down into the night with any whisky named after a person. You might say it just works out like that, and we do have to admit that most new memberships are opened up under the auspices of "nowhere else to go." We recognize that puts us in pretty bad but crowded company as far as cultural institutions go, but let us tell you that its nice and warm in here. For instance Shawn Thald and Jin-Wong Chan stayed best friends until tenth grade, as far as our records indicate.
I don't know why Jin and I starting bringing a cheerleader baton to school and playing catch with it at recess. Probably because its the stupidest thing possible and its even not allowed because its basically as hard as metal. But since we are like the scum of the earth anyway it shouldn't matter what we do, which is why we usually go on the lowest field where its all dust from softball and nobody else goes. Because what happens when we don't go down there is that stupid people mess with us just because they have nothing better to do than open their mouths and let their tongues start clanking around like bells in a church. Jin threw the baton at me almost right when we walked out the door, and it landed near Jessica Slaritz and all her friends and they were already spread around so it was so easy for them to keep ahead of us, throwing it from one person to another. They tried to keep their faces totally still, and act like it didn't matter, but you could see the corners of their mouths want to smile and tell they were getting off on our pain. But then Jin started running around really fast and talking like a rapper and totally ripping into all the girls. First he called Ally "I hate ya when you look like Big Sloppa" because her hair always sticks out so much, and she's kind of chubby, and so even the girls laughed at her, but they kept throwing. Finally one of them said "How long are we going to do this for?" and Jin cut her off and said, "Keep doin' it 4eva!" then started chanting like the chorus to a DMX song: "Cuz I just can't stop breaking down these hoes when they be stealing my cheerleada bataaaahnn, my cheerleada bataaaahnn" You had to have heard it. I could not stop laughing so hard it was like an instant victory for us. It was just like a real song and they knew it, and gave up throwing and tried to say some shit to us as we walked away, but it was nothing we hadn't heard before.
DonKay usually shies from the spotlight, but in this particular instance we can hold our heads high. Carl Kowanachuk usually sends in self-unmaking proverbs culled from his life experience. The Heraclitean vein of DonKay, as you might imagine, qualifies as an artery and then a vein again, and then an artery. Anyway on holidays he sends us a really nice woodcarving. Anyway, about the spotlight, if you're thinking that his name rings a bell, its only because Carl and his story are one of the best loved tales in the cultural history of Canada's 1970's, reaching news tickers worldwide. On this the 32nd aniversary of the day (one the Kowanachuks also celebrate,) we thought we'd give it to you in terms of the original submission.
I'd been working at the hospital six months when I got the call to drive Darla home. She'd been parapalegic two years, one of the victims of the Maw Boys, and had finished a check up when I got the call to pick her up out front. I remember my first impressions were that she was the same mix of grit and glamour as her brown-yellow hair. I took Van 7 on account of its snow tires, and we started off into a blizzard that was kicking up that day. Now she lived a fair bit out there in the country, as I did, and just as we were cresting big Meier's hill I had to steer quick and the van slid off into a ditch and wouldn't go no more. I did my cursing, then started to tell Darla to hang tight while I walked a few miles to the nearest house.
But Darla said 'Fuck waitin'.The she pointed to some cross country skis in the back of the van left there from a employee outing. I said good idea, and tried to get me some boots to fit bindings. When I was getting close, Darla said, ok, now how bout mine? She basically beat me to death with her words and her looks and even her fists until I tied one to each of her knees, and some kid ones to her hands which she said she could steer by. And by god it was scary, but the hill was long and flat as a bunny, now that I looked at it from a skiing perspective. So we made it down that long decline of Meier's road without too much fuss . As you know, Mr Meier (of 7,033 Sunsets Herein Described fame) lives at the hill's base, and we had to knock on his door, having left her chair up with the van. Irma Meier opened up, and though I'd never met them, she was extremely kind. They had the same kind of dogs that I grew up with, the queen's dogs, so we chatted on that, and then we called her husband down. Now Darla's place was only a half mile away, across flat land and Mr. Meier was going to try to drive it. But then Darla caught sight of a wheelbarrow in the yard and with a flick of her cheek said to me- you think you can do me in that one? I almost fell to my knees right there. I lifted her up, and she never took that look of hers off my face. We weren't half way there by the time I proposed holy matrimony, and thats how it happened to me.
The nineteen seventies were an awful time to be a DonKay. And even worse for DonKay punch-clockers. They had to field the chaotic, slipshod filings of operatives like Conrad Baltimore, who submitted mainly by way of napkin. Consider yourself lucky, as coherent scribblings from this era are rare, though period archives are currently under assiduous restoration. This, no different except for a lingering acridity that reeked of bile, gin, and tartar sauce, was the self-professed "Connie's" penultimate contribution. Stricter standards and practices, not seen since the late forties, came back with conservatism and crack during the Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand years. I told Robertson not to wear the pink tie to the Space Shuttle Suppliers Convention. He looks ridiculous. Nothing against neckflair, but straight pink reads 'prick' more swiftly and accurately than other hues. Then again, anyone at a Space Shuttle Suppliers Convention is bound to skew prickish anyway.
Everyone is wearing the same trenchcoat. At the check-in desk, we all got blue folders with flaming rockets on them. I feel sorry for the housewives doling them out at the door. Especially the blonde with the gimpy left stem and the floppy Sunday hat that she hopes is distracting. They've got to search for shuttle-shaped name tags while leery sextuagenarians peruse their cleavage.
"No, our complimentary bar starts at 12:30, Sir. No, that's still twenty minutes away. Sorry."
"Oh, thank you Sir, but I've actually been told that before. What? What you just told me. That I look like an angel. Thanks though."
"Lovely tie, Sir."
"Welcome to the 2006 Triple Ess Con! Fish? Let me check on that for you, Sirs. We'll be serving whiting this year. Enjoy!"
"12:30, Sir."
So what are we hawking this year? Robertson's set on gold leaf reflectors. "New for '72." That cherub-cheeked sonofabitch is pressing flesh this time around. Me, I'm packing a fifth of Old Crow in my breastpocket and am headed straight for the beer nuts. Nothing says 'sloppy lecher' like a whiskey grin with peanut salt in the crinkles of your lips. I am an honest man.
Harry Clerval is just another donkay, though we might say he has above average cut on his teeth. But do you have any idea what the term above average means within an academie that stretches back to the dawn of creation? Nevertheless, there are of course thousands of acadamie members who think that the end-all of dinner discussions is how donKay has changed with time. At 1430 we often prefer the topic “oh yo, check that shit out.” Anyway here’s Harry, eighteen-hundred-whateva.
I woke this morning and went into the sitting room to take a few rays of the sun. There I saw that my wife at some moment unbeknownst to me had changed the portrait displayed in the small frame we brought back from the Photograph-artist. We had sat for several and left his studio with three, all of which are kept within the same glass and pewter, though only one rests on top, face to the world. Our initial choice for this representative was the most neutral of the photos.
Then later, under the admitted influence of brandy, I had snuck into the sitting room and changed it for one where the incline of our heads somehow suggests an amorous air so thickly that I know Minnie was half ashamed to display even to our sitting room public. That image held sway until yesterday. Today the image that has replaced it, in my mind, is even less fit for the eyes of others. You see, our Photo-artist, being an artist as such, with his long bony hands and cigarette as a constant eleventh digit, with the skull-like face whose eyes fix on an object with a strange mix of unchecked interest and deathly apathy, had induced us to give a little shout in the moment of his taking a picture. The shout was to be a cry of joy at our recent matrimony, but of course when sitting for a photograph one is obliged to hold the same position for a long moment, so that spontaneity which is the handmaiden of joy must necessarily perish. In that elongated moment I felt as one must having just stepped off a precipice, and supressed the most acute desire to look down only by treating my face as a collection of flexed muscles.
The resultant Photograph brought out a laugh in Minnie and myself when we first saw its exposure, and in what I must call a fit of bravery I insisted that we purchase it along with the other two. Because, though joy may have been its impulse, looking at the thing now as I write, the most generous interpretation I might give it, (and this was perhaps what I felt in the initial moment when its truth struck me) was that we are both secretly expressing that inner awe at having (to use an americanism) 'tied the knot' at such a stage in our lives, with I still a petty clerk indebted to my firm and she a hand barely fit for sewing. It seems to me then appropriate that this photo rest beneath the others, just as this emotion rests beneath the surface of our happy marriage, acknowledged yet rightfully suppressed.
I cannot then help but wonder why my wife has placed it there. And if I might go further into the realm of the psychologist, and hazard an interpretation of the image, I would say that the look on the face of my wife has retained a greater degree of life, of flexibility, of humour. My face, perhaps owing to the rougher construction of the male physiognomy, looks positively like a mask, its heavy lines obscuring anything that might be called a gesture, robbing the eyes of that glimmer that usually signifies a soul. Indeed I have already made this commentary to my wife, I think perhaps the day after we returned from the studio. She flatly denied what I said about my face, and said I was handsome, and kissed me, and moved things along so speedily I found I could not insist on the argument. But then again I showed it to Landry, and he seemed to agree with me, (though with such discomfort that I had the feeling he might have been nodding only to pass from the subject, it perhaps being a trifle too intimate to myself and Minnie.) So here I am at last, alone with the photograph, paper and pen in the sitting room. And here I find I must thank the Academy for allowing me to submit: It is, as ever, an honor to be before your visage, which I can imagine benevolent because invisible.
One of DonKay's many textual Taj Mahals is by the Monny prince Aran of 13th century what-would-be Thailand. Its called 10,011 Possible Explanations for why my Bride Fell Dead in that Evening. This proto-blogger kept it up for years, the late reasons understandibly becoming Goya-esque cave-in's of self. Here's reason 642, its pretty normal as his reasons go. This one could almost serve as a public service announcement.
The morning prior to that evening when my bride fell dead, she had been slicing pineapple on a slab of wood. The pineapple had sat in the corner of our home for two days, and when she lifted it I noticed a scrunching of her lips. I said "?" and she responded by showing me that it had grown blue and furry on the bottom. She took the knife and began scraping the side of the pineapple, shedding its bark. I was sitting across from her, watching her work. She lay the pineapple on its yellow side and began to slice small sections off. The first slice took the blue bottom off and I noticed that it seemed to have penetrated and darkened the inside flesh. Then, as she continued to slice I saw, but I didn't say, that the new slices were falling against the old one. I imagined the blue rot travelling through the yellow flesh and into other yellow flesh. I saw, but I said nothing, and now the pineapple is long eaten, I somehow survive and my bride is dead. This also could be the reason.
