some chemistry shit fo you

i have had a lifelong love-hate relationship with chemistry. it's complicated. you can tell i am not a very logical person, because my reason for liking it is that i think the glass is pretty.

amin was living on the third floor in an echoey walk-up building with a central dracula court you could see out the windows from the staircase. the apartment was big and dark and very empty, and he bid me make myself at home while standing there uncertain himself, apparently afraid of being scolded for entering his own home. the number of his roommates was unclear--nine or ten, and maybe a married couple. for such a populated apartment, i was surprised by how empty it seemed. i didn't see another soul the entire time i was there.

at the kitchen cabinets, he got out a box of crackers. he hesitated. "i think these are mine," he said, and then we laughed. we ate crackers and looked out the tall windows at the rain and the cars on the street.

i lay on the couch, and he on the floor, and we turned out the lights to sleep.

"my mother found a girl she wants me to marry," he said.

i nodded in the dark. "how do you feel about that?"

"what can i feel, josh? she wants it. i don't want to."

"i didn't think you did."

"oh, no. their traditions are very important for them, though. what can i say? you see, i don't want to hurt their feelings." we were silent for a while. "but i don't want to."

"i understand," i said, meaning i didn't. "the only thing you can say is hell with your traditions."

i could tell he was mad at me for even saying that. "you can't say that. no, you can't. but she is trying to convince me every time we talk."

"why you? rahman's older than you. why don't they look for one for him?"

"i don't know. you know, josh, there are so many things i don't like. she is only sixteen years old."

"that's pretty young."

"hell yes that's young. i've known her for a long time."

"really? you know her, and she's being. . . offered to you?"

"i mean, i like her. i told my mother, that is too young, and i said no we can't do that. then the next week, she tells me she is 19."

"wow, she got old." i laughed in the dark, and amin did his hiccupping laugh too.

"in one month, she went from 16 to 19." he laughed. "that is damn fast."

"if you got married next month, by then she'd be 22, and that's plenty old. she'll probably have been to college by then."

"and you know, in another month and a week, she'll be older than me."

"you can't marry an older woman."

"oh no, when i'm 28, she'll be. . . 52." that really broke us up.

"when i'm 30, she'll be. . . "

"um, 124. you'll be a widower."

we lay there for a while, figuring out new combinations and laughing about it, with just the light of the streetlights from down on the street.

i walked past a cafe on broadway today, and the sidewalk was filled up with tables and chairs and people eating lunch, enjoying the sunny weather. further down the sidewalk, i passed a mother with three little kids, who was saying to them, "okay guys, remember, we're all going to stare at everyone eating here while we go by."

ha. sometimes it is probably fun to have children.

for the past week it has been positively fall-like outside. overcast and fifty-five degrees everyday, and windy. yesterday i was walking down the street, looking down at puddles, and there were blowing leaves on the ground, and i got really confused for a second, sincerely trying to think of what month it was.

this weather is enjoyable, i think. how gauche would it be to have sunny and eighty as your favorite weather? how dreadfully obvious. come on.

let's try to write the dumbest paragraph ever. really, my mind is a blank right now, but i feel compelled. (insert like eight minutes right here.) for some reason, i just thought of something to write about, but for the sake of continuity i am now rejecting all content. so, i have a topic, a dumb one, but i choose emptiness instead. would you rather have meaning, or visceral blankness? do you like the look of yourself reflected in a windy puddle?

this is the story of the dunkin donuts guy by my place:

first, there is a little background. my first year in graduate school, i worked all the time. call it a disease, and one i got over. now i drink all the time. see the difference? now you are filled in on my life from 2002-present. we may proceed.

i used to go in and talk to the dunkin donuts guy after i'd been at work late, and he thought i was nice. he's interesting, because he used to be so happy, and in the past two years or so, i have gotten to watch him become a bitter, unhappy person. i would go in, and he could barely speak english, and would say, "hi, what is your name, i am from bangladesh!"

after that, when he'd been there a while, he went throught a phase where he would shake his head and smile and say, "i wish i were not here all night." (this whole time, you have to picture his english getting better and better.)

so then for a while, i would go in and get a doughnut, and he would give me a dozen, because he was starting to get disaffected. then comes the phase where you say, "have a good night," and he says, "nights? i don't have nights. i am here. always here." next, he waits on you while he talks on one of those telephones that straps to your ear, without saying one word to you. and now, these days, he acknowledges me not at all, and most of the time i have been out and had a few drinks, and i don't think he can tell, but maybe i talk really loud now, and sometimes i do slip when i'm trying to come in the door, and i start to wonder whether he's muslim or not and whether i have become just one more stupid, depraved american to him, and if when no one is there he likes to take the doughnuts off the rack and touch them on the floor.

but probably not. i still like him.

that is the story of the dunkin donuts guy.

one of my defining qualities has always been a music obsession. as a little kid, i bought 45-rpm records of whatever crappy pop songs were in bins 1-10 at the store, so i always had the music fixation, but i wasn't a proper aesthete until later. meaning i wasn't crazy yet. but then puberty gives you all kinds of great hormones--the ones that make you like girls, the ones that make you a music snob. or maybe those two are the same hormones--i don't know.

last night i got the urge to go into guitar center and play bass guitar. so i went in and got a bass and plugged it into the first amp i found and played it for a while--what i could remember, which is next to nothing. some guy with a lanyard around his neck came and said, "you can't play bass through a guitar amp, you gotta go in the bass room." oh. so i stopped.

see, i think he meant, "if you suck, please go in the suck room."

if you like music so much, you owe it to yourself to play, not just listen. i played trumpet when i was younger, and was just good enough to be passable. practicing, though, is something i'm not good at, so there was a limit to how good i could be.

bass was something i decided to learn so i would have to read bass-clef music. also, it made it easier to be in a rock band, the sole purpose of which is to help girls understand just how fucking cool you are. but i shouldn't have picked bass. back then i never realized something that i noticed immediately last night: my hands are half the size they need to be to play bass guitar.

instead, i should have learned guitar. i have the arrogance for it, and guitar players are cooler anyway. if i weren't 31, well into my serious-as-fuck years, maybe i would buy one this afternoon. but no.

sincerely,

grandpa

i read some old email the other night. here is one i sent to mia on august 23, 1999. i was working at tulane at the time, and i think this was my last week there. at the time, it was very hot outside, and my bicycle wheel was crooked because i had run into something not long before. my chief observation is that i sometimes did capital letters then.

To: mia
From: josh
Date: 8/23/99 11:54 AM

Hey Love,

Here I am at work; I do not want to be here. I do not want to work this week. I do not want to work this morning. I do not want to work today. I do not want to work here. I do not want to do this job. I do not want to work in this lab. I do not want to finish this week out. I want to drive away right now and leave it all sitting right where it is; let them figure it out. I don't want to go back upstairs to the lab and finish what I'm doing. I do not want to write it up. I do not want to be within these walls one second more. Bitch bitch bitch. Bitch bitch.

josh will shuttup now.

hm.

love,j

the other day i was taking down some trash on the way to work. in the trash alley, i met our super's father, otherwise known as the old man, who does most of the work. he's not so much with the english, but he's nice.

he pointed to his keyring and then at me, and did something else (i don't remember what) to eventually indicate that he wanted my mailbox key. "oh, sure sure," i said and gave it to him.

our mailbox has some issues with the door coming off. he pocketed my key and said, "open door mailbox fix today me."

that sounds very poetic. open door mailbox fix today me.

in high school, my favorite activity was driving around. this weekend, when we were in tennessee, i took mia on little roads thirty miles out into the country on what used to be my favorite pointless driving route. people live out there, and i always found that interesting. illogically, it made waverly, tennessee seem urban, compared to thirty miles out in the country from waverly, tennessee.


trees on a drive

i told mia, "you know if this were high school, and we were seventeen, and you went to my school and i knew you then, this is what we would be doing. you would be sitting in the passenger seat of a car, with me driving out into the middle of nowhere, and me talking about the songs on the radio." put me in the same place, and i discover that my behavior is not complicated at all, but repeatable and scientifically calculable. josh gallaway is perhaps sad to be ones and zeros.

i haven't been home to tennessee in two years, i realized, and this fact might not have made for a good trip. i think my parents and i both treated it as a momentous occasion, and there is nothing so odd as a momentous occasion is there?


red dirt

on the way back to new york, we spent a couple days in nashville, which is my adopted hometown, or at least where i have always told people i am from to avoid explanation.


music publishing began in nashville in 1824

there is something in the air that's very good about nashville. it took time for me to feel it, and it is not easy to put your finger on. of course, as a kid i thought that every city must be like nashville, but then as one spends one's twenties compulsively wanderlusting from city to city, it becomes apparent that places really do have their own personalities, like people.


the villager tavern

nashville is a small city in the south, like charlotte or birmingham, so it has that aspect. but because of the music industry, it also has a feeling of being a place that people move to because they have vague ambitions. so it's got "how's you mom"-type southern semi-hospitality, but at other moments it's got "this place will eat you"-type irony. my description is bad, so i resort to an example: at the villager tavern--as fine a bar as i know--on the wall, near the cash register, i can always count on seeing my favorite-ever bumper sticker. it simply reads: NO ONE GIVES A DAMN ABOUT YOUR BAND. that is the nashville i love.

i'm in tennessee. hooray! tennessee, nice to see you. good, good, how are you? waverly tennessee, population 3,432*, how you looking these days? oh baby, you always look the same, not a day over one hundred, i gotta tell you. keep it up. you been going to curves haven't you? doing the lower back machine these days? well i'll be. that's just great. really just really great.

it's nifty when the internet is one of your addictions, because it's like you're gone, but you're still here, because here it all is. i'm in the middle of fuckin trees, but i can still post a comment. i am so powerful.

*made-up number

last year on august 22, versions of two paintings by edvard munch, the scream and madonna, were stolen from the munch museum in oslo.

i read a report a few days ago that a norwegian newspaper called dagbladet claimed that people arrested in the investigation said the paintings were burned. the police apparently have no comment.

i was expecting to hear more about this, but i can't seem to find anything. i don't know if anyone is confirming or denying it.


madonna by edvard munch

but i am not a very good reporter so i may be missing it--for all i know i was on cnn for an entire day. although i doubt that. regardless, isn't that a gorgeous painting?

this morning i sat on my fire escape and read. the sun flies right overhead there, and by god it's kind of nice. during a representative moment (pretend you're me), off to the left you can see the planes taking off at laguardia, each one climbing and banking off in the distance, and down below you can see a big, long moving truck that has parked too close to the middle of the street. what you hear honking and making noise is the garbage truck trying to get around, and it sounds like this: short burst of engine - air brakes - engine - brakes - engine - brakes - driver saying something - engine - brakes - etc. there's a long line of cars behind the garbage truck--people who thought this little street would be a good bet.

i would take a picture, but it's gotten kind of cloudy, and so i give you the N tracks on sunday instead. same weather, different scene.


the N tracks in astoria

when i look at the clouds over new york, i feel different about them than clouds in, say, tennessee. if i lie in the grass and look at the clouds someplace secluded--like i see a lot of green grass and some trees and the clouds--then they seem like my clouds. but here, i know that millions of people can see the same clouds, and consequently they seem further away. they are museum clouds.