Thoughts from across the pond

Little updates and such, and stories from the other side of the world.

  • “What’s in a name?”

    “Your name? So let me get this straight,” he asked, slightly laughing. “Your real name is Constance, but you go by Cassie? Why don’t you go by Cassandra?”

    It was a very long story, and a question I had heard about a thousand times before. Normally, I had a block quote response, if you will, to explain this, but on this day I was tired.

    “It is a very very long story,” I said. “I have always gone by Cassie. Have always been known as Cassie, since birth. Constance is simply the name on my legal records.”

    “But why, then, didn’t your parents call you Cassandra?”

    It is a long story, I said. I was going to be known as Constance, but the compromise was Cassie, and I thought that maybe someday I would grow into a Constance…and….that day has not quite come yet.

    “Well,” Peter chimed in. “Cassandra is truly a perfect name for an Intelligence Analyst”.

    “I agree,” I said. “Well, except for one thing.”

    And Peter and I both said the same words at the exact same time, “but nobody believed her”.

  • The Way We Really Were

    Summerish 2007 – The University of Arizona. A Cell Phone Call.

    “Do you want to know why I like him?” she asked me, point blank. “I figured it out…”

    “No, wait. What? Why?”

    “Because he is exactly like you…” she paused before bluntly blurting out: “but with a dick.”

    Dear God. Please do not go into any more details about my brother in this manner.

    My face went bright red. “Jasmine, wait, what?”

    “No, I’m serious,” her deep voice demanded itself be echoed across Los Angeles toward my little green LG Rumour in Tucson, Arizona. “The same mannerisms. The way you even walk! The same sense of humour. You guys — you guys are literally the same. The same exact person. I swear to God.”

    But we were not the exact same. He was decidedly less judgemental, more open-minded. Less uptight: He had, I would say, simply more empathy than me.

    And I remember that empathy. I remember. The Summer of 2006. I remember him driving the Pontiac: when everything still felt like it was just beginning.

    In less than four years it would become his coffin.

    You see, he had these big dreams. That’s the thing about Arizona — so wide, so spacious, enough to fill its landscape with big ideas and big hopes. The openness of it all really made you think two things: one, that you had to escape it somehow; and two, that each little crevice of the Catalinas and the Santa Rita Mountains were little nooks that you could fold your dreams into.

    One day, in his Pontiac, when he was taking me to a really shitty retail job I had at the mall, he looked into the driver’s mirror, then at me, and asked, “What do you want to be when you get older?”

    “I don’t know. I think I want to be X.”

    “Then be X!” he declared. “Be X! I really do think you can be anything you want if you just put your mind to it.”

    He continued about how he wanted to be a guitarist one day, how he wanted to get out of this place. How he didn’t fit in.

    “And another thing,” he added, “I don’t want to get married or have kids until I’m 40. What about you?”

    “Me?” I told him the script I thought I was supposed to say. “I want to have three kids by the time I’m thirty, but I always want to—”

    “That’s too young. Too young. Travel. Do things. It’s crazy to live in the suburbs like this. I don’t want to settle down yet. Not yet. There’s a lot of life to…”

    I remember that empathy. I remember; I remember it all. Back when the world felt large enough for our dreams, yet still small enough to fix:

    August 1995 – Boston, Massachusetts.

    I was almost 9. He was ten years old.

    We saw a cold, Black homeless man slumped outside the traditional New England restaurant on our first trip to Boston, Massachusetts, the state of which to this day I struggle to pronounce. Mom, Dad, and my younger brother walked right by. I saw him too — but more importantly, I saw, my older brother, Ted, seeing him. And I couldn’t let go of Ted’s face. The tenderness in his big brown eyes. And the general feeling of sorrow.

    When we sat down to eat, I remembered us getting the clam chowder and the tiny oyster crackers, and Ted quietly slipping each oyster packet into his pocket as if he were lining his coat with a stash of secrets. He saw me seeing him.

    He whispered, “I just thought. I just thought – I could take these to that guy out there. Do you think he’d still be outside after dinner?”

    I told him that was a great idea. As dinner came, I could see guilt in those brown eyes. And it was slowly consuming him. “I really hope he’s still outside. So that we can feed him”.

    Later that Summerish 2007 – A Rooftop in an old apartment block in Hollywood, California.

    The summer Jasmine confessed her love of my older brother to me was a challenge. I, myself, was single and clueless. I had, at once, felt lost and out of place. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I had a severe falling out with two of my three roommates. It was over nothing, but really it was over everything. It was just the culmination of years of trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be, and slowly seeing how my values or thoughts or processes no longer aligned with theirs. It was perhaps the start of something — me shedding who I was and going on the path to becoming something: the woman I had always wanted to be.

    Ted thought I was repressed. So, too, did my best friend Jasmine. This was why Jasmine and I had made such perfect sense. The moment I met her I will never forget — it was Halloween and I was still at my laptop working on some essay I was worried sick about that was due in three days whilst naturally dressed as Jack Sparrow, and she barged in there in a full-on hooker outfit, a dollar bill stuffed into her bra. She stared at me like I were a tragic project: she wondered why such a young person would waste her youth worrying about such trivialities. Years later I would introduce her to my brother Ted.

    That summer, Ted, Jasmine, and I were all on top of the rooftop of the Hollywood apartment complex that was probably haunted by dead starlets from the ’50s who never amounted to anything. We stood at the top of the rooftop, just the three of us. We piled within ourselves beer after beer after beer, and slowly — and yet all of the sudden — I was hammered. I would listen to Ted talk and Jasmine rattle on about some crazy shit she saw in LA the other day. She was working at the El Capitan Theatre and would regularly meet weirdos and famous people, and was recounting some tales she had. Then Ted would chime in with a comment or two and then laugh, and we all gathered together to discuss world events, which at the time were not many. There was a growing, unpopular war in Iraq, and then somehow Paris Hilton.

    And I did let it be known that I hated Paris Hilton. I hated everything she stood for. She was blonde, she was born rich, she didn’t seem particularly nice, and for me — a brunette who was bullied in my younger years alongside Ted — this represented the enemy. I probably waffled on a bit in my usual diatribes, and then Ted muttered something about how I was very repressed and judgmental sometimes, and then he proceeded to talk again once more about how he felt sorry for all the homeless people in Los Angeles — there were so many of them — and how he kept losing money because he kept giving that money away. Then he also said something about how he “saw things,” and I did what I normally do and poo-pooed it: “No, you don’t, Ted.” I shut it down and that was that.

    At some point, in the hot, sticky Hollywood summer night, someone got the bright idea to go to the mall. The three of us — drunk, laughing, spinning — danced across the streets of Los Angeles.

    And then I saw it: the barricade of my enemy. My own Fort Sumter. The Louis Vuitton store — the shrine to everything Paris Hilton adored and the very brand she represented.

    “Guys, I’m gonna do it,” I said, matter-of-factly.

    Jasmine: “No you are not. NO CASSIE DO NOT DO IT! TED”—she screamed at my brother, and he was laughing, he was laughing so hard. A real Ted laugh like I hadn’t heard for some time. A real pleasure to be hold. At that point in my life, one of my quiet reoccurring goals had always been to make him laugh like that. “HAHAHA,” he snorted.

    Jasmine: “NO, DON’T DO IT, OH MY GOD, DO NOT DO IT, CASSIE.”

    “Yep, I’m gonna do it. This has to happen.”

    I pulled my pants down, and I took a piss in front of the Louis Vuitton store. As I did it, precariously balancing, I put both of my middle fingers up, looked at the CCTV camera, and shouted, “FUCK YOU, PARIS HILTON.” Ted had celebrated that moment. He couldn’t believe what he had seen. A side of me he didn’t believe existed. That all came crashing down the next day when I woke in his apartment to absolutely unfathomable fears that I cannot do justice to its description: “OMG HOW DO WE GET IN THERE AND ERASE THOSE CCTV TAPES?” I shouted upon waking seemingly without any context.

    Less than three years later he would be dead. But at that very moment I didn’t know it yet. At that moment I think I first broke free.

  • To Everything

    Mr. Rogers, an avowed Socialist, an unironic Yankees fan (this was before Moneyball), and teacher at our high school, had once tried to explain the merits of The Sun Also Rises.

    I listened as he mused about Hemingway’s masterpiece and became annoyed.

    I didn’t like the book.

    In echoes of my ‘came-of-age-during-the-Reagan-era’ father, I wondered: “Why are they going around complaining all day and drinking their lives away in Spain while brooding, when they could be doing something or getting a job?”

    Mr. Rogers responded along the lines of: “you have to understand the time period this was written in” or some words vaguely similar.

    They were called the Lost Generation. They had just come back from the Great War; their lives shattered; nothing held any meaning anymore.

    All the great promises and dreams of the industrial revolution that first sprang up in Manchester, England, metamorphized into the horrors of modern warfare.

    And everything they were taught and believed in no longer made any sense.

    “To come back from the Great War that was by all accounts pointless and had not really served in America’s interest…not unlike the events surrounding our current Mad King George….” and, cue the side sneer at our beloved Commander-in-Chief.

    “Throughout American history”, Mr. Rogers said, in another class, “there has always been a great pendulum swing between liberalism and conservatism, and right now we are still in an age of conservatism. I imagine that…” — Myself, I imagined Bombs over Baghdad¹ and freedom fries, and hummed a little tune from a decade he seemed to be so preoccupied by:

    To everything…²

    In another lecture. at another time, he let us know this: “You, here, at this College Preparatory — this high school – this is a bubble. And soon you’ll be going off to another bubble” – before vaguely pointing in the direction of the University of Arizona.

    —–

    When I did finally claw my way out of that second bubble, the market crashed. My brother had just killed himself³, and myself and my generational cohorts, entered an environment replete with unpaid internships, or contract jobs if we were lucky. Shackled by student loan debt, highly educated, somehow frequently overqualified and jobless, I left to do the only thing I could think of: go to Europe, be with my one true love, get even more educated, and hope something made sense after that.

    It was there I found myself in my twenties dancing and drinking throughout London⁴, trying to climb up any underpaid ladder, somehow an anxious person making her way into the field of security.

    Open-source intelligence indicates there is a likelihood of protests outside the Benghazi Consulate.

    I’m sorry sir, your home country is undergoing some kind of government overthrow;

    No, we are an able to book you flights out of Istanbul at this time.

    And in our own little life –

    Cheap flights, package deals, trips tacked onto work events abroad.

    Let’s go to Milan!

    to Paris!

    Isis attacks!

    Brexit!

    Trump!

    And yet — nothing did make sense.

    Reagan had died some years before. Up was down; right was left; conservatives were liberals; liberals were conservatives; the republicans were now anti-war and against free trade; liberals were now supporting the neoliberalism ideals of Bush.

    And in London-

    We’ll never be able to buy that house or have the kids we might as well drink!

    Let’s dance!

    Our grandparents fought the twin evils of fascism and communism and made the world a better place only to see it torn apart by their own children!

    Gen X- who cares? They did provide great entertainment though (grunge⁶, Friends – oh how we all wanted to live in the show Friends)

    Let’s drink!

    In Copenhagen, I locked myself out of my AirBnB and was forced to stay up all night at a gay club listening to the syrupy sounds of Aqua⁵ on repeat. It was there I met a Scandinavian who lamented the downfall of Western civilisation, blaming it on the region’s “failure to follow our true religion, that of the Norse gods”.

    In Spain’s Basque region, I ran with a single bull.

    In Brussels, I saw a Walloon man drape the Belgian tricolour next to a sign that read: “We beat Iraq, 541 days without a government!”

    In Istanbul, I saw the Hagia Sophia; in Dublin: “Every American that comes here says they’re Irish. But really, they’re half this, a half that, and when I ask them about it, it’s always their great-great-grandfather – that’s not Irish. They’re Plastic Paddy’s!” In Tokyo: “no 1 sport is base-eh-bol, not the fat man!”

    In Amsterdam…I forget.

    But back in London, oh yes London the forerunner of globalisation, that by-product of capitalism made known by the Scottish Smith, an American, a Hungarian, a German, a Russian and three-salt-of-the-earth Brits peered out over a semi-high rise apartment rooftop over the London Eye, which had been lit up in blue as a warning that the U.K. was — maybe perhaps could be? Let’s negotiate further? Can we keep Northern Ireland with us?– going to pull off the impossible: we were leaving the EU.

    I don’t care! This is going to be our year! This is going to be our decade! We cried.⁷

    3

    2

    1

    Then, suddenly, the world stopped.

    And to the horror of every Brit: the pubs closed.

    And then:

    Pitter Patter

    Pitter patter

    Pitter patter

    A new life emerged. A new start, a chance to begin again: Generation Alpha had arrived, and with the pinkest of feet.⁸

    ———

    Back, way back, some twenty years ago, Mr. Rogers pulled out a book I did like. Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

    Its story took place nearly a century before Williamsburg turned itself into a millennial apocalypse, complete with Soul Cycle-farm-to-table-craft-beer-bearded-men-what-have-you’s.

    As is so often the case in American literature, the most important observations come from that of a young girl (think Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird) – in this case the fictional Francine’s half- Irish, half-Austrian American life was about to be consumed by calls for Freedom Cabbage ahead of her country’s entry into the Great War.

    And, Mr Rogers argued, one of the greatest scenes in all American literature, is thus:

    Francie stared at the oldest man. She played her favorite game, figuring out about people. His thin tangled hair was the same dirty gray as the stubble standing on his sunken cheeks.

    Dried spittle caked the corners of his mouth. He yawned. He had no teeth. She watched, fascinated and revolted, as he closed his mouth, drew his lips inward until there was no mouth, and made his chin come up to almost meet his nose. She studied his old coat with the padding hanging out of the torn sleeve seam. His legs were sprawled wide in helpless relaxation and one of the buttons was missing from his grease-caked pants opening.

    She saw that his shoes were battered and broken open at the toes. One shoe was laced with a much- knotted shoestring, and the other with a bit of dirty twine. She saw two thick dirty toes with creased gray toenails. Her thoughts ran….

    “He is old. He must be past seventy. He was born about the time Abraham Lincoln was living and getting himself ready to be president. Williamsburg must have been a little country place then and maybe Indians were still living in Flatbush. That was so long ago.” She kept staring at his feet. “He was a baby once. He must have been sweet and clean, and his mother kissed his little pink toes”.

    “Think about that for a moment”, Mr Rogers paused. We all had baby feet once⁹