American Fez

Harriet Krishna

The angriest person I ever encountered was a vegan Yoga instructor, controlled breathing advocate, militant meditator, and theoretical Taoist. Unfortunately, she was also the apparently "flexible" girlfriend of my roommate at the time, which made her difficult to avoid. Her personal philosophy was deeply rooted in conspicuous exhibitions of serenity and transcendence. Yet she instantly became a whirligig of red-faced, blustering rage at the slightest provocation, the merest impingement upon her holistic wants and needs: being confronted with a cafe menu that only offered regular tea and no herbal varieties, for instance, would entail a lengthy harangue of the waitress and demands to speak to the manager. 

Her aura of calm shattered easily, like a brick thrown through a plate glass window at point blank range. Her sense of oneness could suddenly split into a zillion infuriated atoms. Her feeling of centeredness might be yanked violently from left to right at any moment. She is almost impossible to describe without resorting to such New Age cliches because she was the ne plus ultra of walking New Age cliches. I often thought of her as a smoldering volcano hidden beneath a Tibetan hat, wisps of smoke billowing out of her ears before she erupted into streams of hot, molten invective. 

Subsequently, she would always pretend these temper tantrums never happened, but quickly flare up again should you insist they had and dare to request an apology. My roommate's day was regularly occupied with making spineless, placatory phone calls and purchasing peace offerings for arguments he did not start. I was expelled from a party at her apartment when failing to remove my shoes before wandering into the room that doubled as a shrine to a collection of mostly Eastern deities, exclusively female naturally, except for the fellow with the elephant's head. Consequently, I complained about being chased away by a herd of stampeding Ganeshas, an attempt at levity which did not improve the situation. I was persona non grata for several blissful weeks afterward. What a relief not to be constantly tiptoeing around on rainbow-painted eggshells.

A working knowledge of the Kama Sutra can only compensate for a certain amount of personality disorder, however, and eventually my roommate dumped her. "I thought she'd be more easy going," he explained. "Because she's such a big hippy." Alas, appearances are deceptive, of course, especially when they are obscured by clouds of incense and ersatz spirituality. After their break-up, she disappeared out of my life for about ten years. Then I saw her again at the Starbucks near my office, unrecognizable at first as her kaftan and Pre-Raphaelite hair had been replaced by business attire and a power perm. But once identified I felt the muscles in my neck stiffen as she ordered a complicated coffee drink, afraid the barista would get it wrong and an unpleasant scene would ensue. 

Fortunately, her order was completed without a problem, so I thought it safe to make my presence known. She had changed far more than I, yet could not place me nor my old roommate. In fact, despite admitting a vague interest in basic yoga she denied ever being an advocate of Eastern mysticism and its various disciplines. Her eyelids were flickering and her lips pursed, always early warning signs of an impending explosion, so I let the matter drop. But it was definitely her. To raise the specter of Ganesha again, I have an elephant's memory for such irritating people. I suppose I should learn to be more Zen when dealing with others, however irksome they might be, but somehow I've never found the right teacher.

Ghost Story

When I was a child, I believed the abandoned, derelict house at the end of our street was haunted. But when I became a man, I put away childish things and realized the house actually provided a great redevelopment and investment opportunity.

The only ghost here was the melancholy specter of that old, crumbling Victorian home, which needed exorcizing then demolishing so a new, nondescript apartment block with underground parking could be built. 

I jest grimly, of course. I'd much rather reside in a haphazard neighborhood of haunted houses than a planned community gridiron of Soviet revival rabbit hutches.

Alas, each year we welcome more condominiums and increased boxification. It's like seeing the ground beneath my feet shift from handmade walnut backgammon board to some kind of computerized chess interface.

This is progress, no doubt. The modern lifestyle comes to town. The only problem is that the apartment blocks seem to be as empty as the abandoned, derelict houses. Occasionally I spy the blue glow of a widescreen TV as big as the wall but often the windows are dark.

At first, I thought the occupants must toil away all night in their "tech district" offices downtown, not getting back until past midnight. But these days everybody is supposed to be working-from-home and the lights are still out. 

Does no-one live there at all? Perhaps it is these apartment blocks that are really haunted; haunted by the dead financial dreams of their developers and investors, by the phantom of ground-floor retail-space zoning. 

Practice Makes Perfect

"Practice social distancing," an epidemiological edict reminiscent of my musical tutor's persistent demand that I practice the scales of the piano, current domestic quarantine situations being an ideal opportunity to practice both at the same time. Although one end of a piano is only about five feet away from the other, so I imagine performance of compositions for four hands are out of the question. C-sharp could easily catch Coronavirus from B-flat by virtue of its unsafe proximity. At least that's how I recall the opposing notational poles of a piano keyboard, not having practiced playing the instrument for many years (and only very irregularly back when I had a tutor, hence his constant hectoring).

But that is mere idle reverie. Obviously human life is more important than hammering away at the works of Chopin, so I practice social distancing with great application. By standing exactly six feet away from the coat stand in my hallway, I am able to memorize the amount of space between it and I, then remain that mental measurement apart from other people when walking abroad or buying wine at the liquor store. Having done this for several weeks, I now have a great eye for distances provided they are divisible or multipliable by six. If I don't think the distance is not a variable of six I'll say "about half a dozen" or "roughly three dozen." Such superficial estimations not only seem to cover most spatial queries, but are also useful practice for making lazy generalizations in other scenarios too.

Alas, my fellow citizens are not as diligent as I when social distancing, many of them happy to wander within four feet of others, sometimes just three feet or even only one-fifth of a dozen. I can't believe such potentially deadly encroachments are made on purpose or are due to willful ignorance. They are undoubtedly the result of cash-strapped consumers innocently purchasing fake, truncated yardsticks manufactured in China. So I ask, when will the unconscionable practice of importing cheap Chinese goods into this country finally be banned? Surely people are willing to pay an extra $4.28 per yardstick for an American-made product, at least in practice, if it means we can all accurately exercise our six-foot social distancing. 

Fahrenheit 45Zzzzzz

Reading in bed at night, my eyelids flicker and the pages flutter, the words drift out of focus and the book falls into my lap. The bedside table lamp seems to dim of its own accord and I'm asleep before my mind has reached the end of the sentence. 

Apparently my mind is so fatigued that in the morning I don't remember what information I supposedly digested the evening before. It's impossible to pick-up where I left off in a story because I possess zero recollection of what the characters said or did.

Consequently I can't seem to get beyond chapter one of any book. To tell the truth, I often re-read the first chapter of a novel six or seven times in a vain effort to make some sort of progress. If it's a whodunnit, I never uncover the surprising identity of the murderer. If it's dystopian sci-fi, I never discover whether or not the survivors of Calyx VI manage to repopulate the Zenethian star system. If it's an English tale of social mores, I never find out if the gloomy narrator will finally stop moaning about class barriers and just get on with his boring life.

This is also true of international travel guides. After learning how to leave the airport by train or taxi, I start dozing off before making it into the center of the city. My knowledge of natural history is extinct after the meteorites wipe out the dinosaurs. As far as I'm aware, there are no great feats of engineering after the fall of the Roman Empire. 

So I started reading a short story collection, one easy-to-finish story per night, in order to regain a feeling of accomplishment. The shorter the story the better was the plan. But, alas, I didn't find the form very satisfying. Short stories just don't provide the mental nourishment a novel does. In fact, they are so unsatisfactory that I threw the book at my bedroom wall and lay awake all night feeling cheated.

Masquerade Ball

Many years ago, when visiting Venice, I purchased a souvenir Venetian carnival mask: the 'plague-doctor' model featuring an elongated nose that resembles the face of the Looney Tunes cartoon buzzard. It's white with black curlicue embellishments and ties elaborately around the head by means of a silken ribbon. Besides colorful glass bowls and squares of fancy lace, a carnival mask is the sort of thing tourists bring home from a trip to La Serenissima. Damp socks, too, if their visit coincides with Acqua alta flooding.

At least damp socks can be dried and reworn. You can balance the colorful bowl on the end of a side-table and fill it with pistachios when friends come round. Even the lace can be spread across the back of an armchair or draped over a lampshade to dim ambient light. But what are you going to do with a plague-doctor mask? I guess you can hang it on the wall but it doesn't really fill the space, and as home decor it looks uncomfortably similar to those schmaltzy porcelain Pierrot masks that festoon the bedrooms of teenage girls. So why, you wonder, did you buy the stupid thing in the first place? It's not like you're getting invited to a masquerade ball in some waterlogged Palazzo anytime soon.

Until last week, I kept my my plague-doctor mask in a box of other homeless object d'art in a dark corner of the household coat closet. Since we're in the midst of this Coronavirus pandemic, however, I decided now was as good a time as any to remove it from storage and actually put it on. There is, after all, an actual plague stalking the land you understand. Not that I'm intending to practice unlicensed medicine or paint cautionary crosses on victim's doors, of course, but it does add a sense of theater and historic occasion to our present Quarantined circumstance.

Alas, the Venetian plague-doctor mask was designed to protect the practitioner and not his patient. Consequently it does not comply with State Government guidelines for covering your face in public places, which stress masks are supposed to shield the passer-by from any disease the wearer may carry and not vice-versa. Apparently I could be coughing Coronavirus all over the street (or the Grand Canal) if I coughed while wearing my plague-doctor mask outside. Which means I'm forced to wear this generic, flat, hospital-blue fabric thing with elastic attachments that hook behind my ears. It's not a look even Casanova could have rocked during Carnival.

Pneumatic Thoughts

According to Paul Bowles, whom I've been reading lately, the North African Tuareg people believe that the soul and breath are identical. What this means for common respiratory maladies such as garlic breath isn't, alas, made clear in his narrative. Could an unwary tribesman find himself afflicted with "garlic soul?" Or perhaps the Tuareg never eat garlic? Bowles doesn't say. Tuaregs inhabited an area of the Sahara controlled by France, so garlic soul was obviously a problem. Imagine a poor, Islamic Tuareg goatherd being interrogated by a close-talking French Legionnaire and getting not only garlic soul but also Catholic soul breathed all over him at the same time. The horror, the horror ...

Since COVID 19 infection is communicable by breath, I find myself wondering what the Tuareg think of the current pandemic. Can you catch Coronavirus of the soul? What sort of mask best prevents particles of contagious soul being coughed into the atmosphere? And how long does Coronavirus soul contamination survive on different surfaces? At least the Sahara provides a great deal of space in which the Tuareg can practice social distancing. Just remember not to share camels and wash your hands at the oasis. And on that unwarranted exhortation to an unknown people in uncertain times, I'll conclude this embarrassingly ignorant rumination on Tuareg culture and modern virology.