Glasgow's Mexican Cafe, Bentonville, Ark.
Decor like your grandpa's favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint: figured glass chandiliers, stuffed swordfish, sombreros and oil paintings on the wall, red tablecloth and carpet to hide the inevitable salsa spills. This tiny place seast about 100 and doesn't accept reservations. The portions are large, the food good, solid fare. A big tamale that doesn't suffer from the blandness some larger specimens sometimes exhibit. The service is a bit spotty and the place seems a little understaffed, but it tolerates kids well and that can be a boon. An occasional plume floats over from the cancer ward, but this old building was not built with segregation in mind. All in all, a singular experience that, while not authentically Mexican like the Mexican-owned restaurants in the area, a good interpretation of the cuisine.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Monday, June 20, 2005
Vignette
I make my living writing and thinking--I know, it's hard to tell from my recent lack of output--because it's the only way to fill this beast inside me that needs. Believe me, there are days I wish my calling was breaking bricks with my skull; it seems it would have to be easier than this, or at least less risky. But while I might be able to make a living doing something else, I find it difficult to live doing anything else; this is what I do, what I feel I must do, and every day I don't do it is painful. So you can imagine I've been hurting a lot. I wish I could say I have the end in sight, but I'm none too sure of my vision anymore.
There is a mass gestating inside me, a gestalt fancied mass that feeds on my daily input of reading and listening, that's building (I hope) to some conclusion that will eclipse its seeds and become a wondrous flower. I can feel it, I can get a sense of its outlines and some of its texture, pieces of the puzzle. And it's frustrating. Not that it's building. Next to the epiphanic moment when it comes to fruition, the building-up is the best part, and that normally would make me almost ecstatic with anticipation. (Yes, I fully realize the sexual overtones in the above, and they're there for a reason: it's tantric, plain and simple. Or at least, it's my image of a Tantric process, and that's all anyone really has.)
But it's not a joyous occasion. I'm blocked. Blocked like I've never been blocked before. Desperate to find the rope that will get me out of this damned sinkhole but finding my fingers and brain too numb and dumb to get ahold of the thing. I'm trying everything--including this masturbatory bit of self-therapy--to get out of my predicament. New things, old things, organizational strategies, mind games, emotional outbursts and whatever else seems to hold any hope.
On top of that, I'm having serious mental and neurological difficulties: failing memory, coordination difficulties, hand and wrist pain. It's apparently not carpel tunnel; examination has revealed no nerve or bone/tendon/muscle damage.
To illustrate how down this has made me fell, the following: I have what has been determined to be strep throat, or at least that's what the doctor's treating me for and I don't think a week of partial penicillin therapy has quite killed it. I woke up last Monday feeling OK, a little scratch in the throat. Everything went fine until the afternoon, when I went from perfectly fine to freezing, aching, a 104-degree fever and shivering-while-wearing-sweatpants-and-a-long-sleeve-shirt-on-an-Arkansas-summer's-day within 30 minutes. I tried to soldier (or perhaps in my case the verb should be Marine) through, to the point of trying to cook dinner for the wife and kids.
I dropped something during cooking. It's been happening a lot, to the point where it's impossible to ignore and I can't pretend that I just misjudged how things would react to my actions, instead facing the fact that whatever control I have of my body is slipping. My wife seems to think I've always been clumsy, despite the evidence she has from living with me for years before this started. She is Zen; nothing occurs but the now, now is forever; it's pretty annoying when she insists she can't see any differences when I damned well know I didn't drop things, didn't forget things, didn't blow up at the frustration of a mind-body split that widens by the day. Maybe she thinks ignoring it is supportive, like rushing to soothe our son just as soon as he makes a peep while sleeping; maybe she's clueless and it's another case of me noticing things in myself that no one else does (hyper-awareness or hypochondria, you make the call; I'm in no condition to judge).
But I dropped something, and I got enraged (though that seems far too pathetic a term for the red bolt that shot through me), and the next thing I know, I lying in bed in the fetal position, shaking like a leaf from fever both physical and emotional, and thinking about how I don't want to live like this. Don't want to drop things, don't want to blow up over nothing, don't want to have my emotions twisted beyond all recognition by a battery commercial while I can't seem to connect with the feelings in the three people closest to me, don't want to have to put up with the tube blowing air into my nose every night so the four hours I can stand to keep the machine on gives me the rest I could have in 10 hours without for a net gain of zero, don't want to have to lay in bed worrying about whether the thoughts I'm having in my barrier-free mind are warning signs or just the product of too much heat in the noggin.
I have a very confused relationship with suicide, the concept of my own, the concept and the reality of others', the general idea and specific applications. It can be the most tragic waste of life, a permanent solution to problems that only become permanent when you kill yourself and remove all possibility of resolution. But I also see Anthony Swofford's point: the suicide does something and no longer allows it to be done to him. I can see times where the taking, or giving, of one's life can be the greatest good possible. (This, for those who are interested, is surely an "If by whiskey" speech.1) This sort of ambivalence makes it very hard to distinguish thinking about suicide and thinking about suiciding, and as I don't want to worry people (or visit any padded rooms) unnecessarily, I tend not to discuss this sort of thing outside of masturbatory self-help attempts, which may be a mistake. No, this is not a note, don't call anyone. And as in most of these intractable philisophical questions, I fall to the side of "it's up to individual mores, greatest good should be sought, and the balancing of rights and responsibilities is the only sign of civilization." But this time the individual is me, the classic untrustworthy narrator, the greatest good is, as always, almost impossible to calculate from the inside as things unfold, and that last bit makes for wonderfully flexible political science but doesn't apply that well to personal questions.
The hell of it is, I don't know that this does any good. A 1,100-word-plus diatribe on how I feel may be more than I've written outside of any academic papers here lately (and they haven't been very good), and it definitely feels good to get this off my chest, I don't have any confidence that it'll be more than a flash in the pan.
1 From Mississippi lawyer Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat Jr. (if that isn't the all-time greatest name-nickname combination, I don't know what is) on prohibition: "If by whiskey, you mean the water of life that cheers men's souls, that smooths out the tensions of the day, that gives gentle perspective to one's view of life, then put my name on the list of the fervent wets. But if by whiskey, you mean the devil's brew that rends families, destroys careers and ruins one's ability to work, then count me in the ranks of the dries." Maybe Soggy was wiser than we think; surely effect must be counted into any equation of good and evil.
There is a mass gestating inside me, a gestalt fancied mass that feeds on my daily input of reading and listening, that's building (I hope) to some conclusion that will eclipse its seeds and become a wondrous flower. I can feel it, I can get a sense of its outlines and some of its texture, pieces of the puzzle. And it's frustrating. Not that it's building. Next to the epiphanic moment when it comes to fruition, the building-up is the best part, and that normally would make me almost ecstatic with anticipation. (Yes, I fully realize the sexual overtones in the above, and they're there for a reason: it's tantric, plain and simple. Or at least, it's my image of a Tantric process, and that's all anyone really has.)
But it's not a joyous occasion. I'm blocked. Blocked like I've never been blocked before. Desperate to find the rope that will get me out of this damned sinkhole but finding my fingers and brain too numb and dumb to get ahold of the thing. I'm trying everything--including this masturbatory bit of self-therapy--to get out of my predicament. New things, old things, organizational strategies, mind games, emotional outbursts and whatever else seems to hold any hope.
On top of that, I'm having serious mental and neurological difficulties: failing memory, coordination difficulties, hand and wrist pain. It's apparently not carpel tunnel; examination has revealed no nerve or bone/tendon/muscle damage.
To illustrate how down this has made me fell, the following: I have what has been determined to be strep throat, or at least that's what the doctor's treating me for and I don't think a week of partial penicillin therapy has quite killed it. I woke up last Monday feeling OK, a little scratch in the throat. Everything went fine until the afternoon, when I went from perfectly fine to freezing, aching, a 104-degree fever and shivering-while-wearing-sweatpants-and-a-long-sleeve-shirt-on-an-Arkansas-summer's-day within 30 minutes. I tried to soldier (or perhaps in my case the verb should be Marine) through, to the point of trying to cook dinner for the wife and kids.
I dropped something during cooking. It's been happening a lot, to the point where it's impossible to ignore and I can't pretend that I just misjudged how things would react to my actions, instead facing the fact that whatever control I have of my body is slipping. My wife seems to think I've always been clumsy, despite the evidence she has from living with me for years before this started. She is Zen; nothing occurs but the now, now is forever; it's pretty annoying when she insists she can't see any differences when I damned well know I didn't drop things, didn't forget things, didn't blow up at the frustration of a mind-body split that widens by the day. Maybe she thinks ignoring it is supportive, like rushing to soothe our son just as soon as he makes a peep while sleeping; maybe she's clueless and it's another case of me noticing things in myself that no one else does (hyper-awareness or hypochondria, you make the call; I'm in no condition to judge).
But I dropped something, and I got enraged (though that seems far too pathetic a term for the red bolt that shot through me), and the next thing I know, I lying in bed in the fetal position, shaking like a leaf from fever both physical and emotional, and thinking about how I don't want to live like this. Don't want to drop things, don't want to blow up over nothing, don't want to have my emotions twisted beyond all recognition by a battery commercial while I can't seem to connect with the feelings in the three people closest to me, don't want to have to put up with the tube blowing air into my nose every night so the four hours I can stand to keep the machine on gives me the rest I could have in 10 hours without for a net gain of zero, don't want to have to lay in bed worrying about whether the thoughts I'm having in my barrier-free mind are warning signs or just the product of too much heat in the noggin.
I have a very confused relationship with suicide, the concept of my own, the concept and the reality of others', the general idea and specific applications. It can be the most tragic waste of life, a permanent solution to problems that only become permanent when you kill yourself and remove all possibility of resolution. But I also see Anthony Swofford's point: the suicide does something and no longer allows it to be done to him. I can see times where the taking, or giving, of one's life can be the greatest good possible. (This, for those who are interested, is surely an "If by whiskey" speech.1) This sort of ambivalence makes it very hard to distinguish thinking about suicide and thinking about suiciding, and as I don't want to worry people (or visit any padded rooms) unnecessarily, I tend not to discuss this sort of thing outside of masturbatory self-help attempts, which may be a mistake. No, this is not a note, don't call anyone. And as in most of these intractable philisophical questions, I fall to the side of "it's up to individual mores, greatest good should be sought, and the balancing of rights and responsibilities is the only sign of civilization." But this time the individual is me, the classic untrustworthy narrator, the greatest good is, as always, almost impossible to calculate from the inside as things unfold, and that last bit makes for wonderfully flexible political science but doesn't apply that well to personal questions.
The hell of it is, I don't know that this does any good. A 1,100-word-plus diatribe on how I feel may be more than I've written outside of any academic papers here lately (and they haven't been very good), and it definitely feels good to get this off my chest, I don't have any confidence that it'll be more than a flash in the pan.
1 From Mississippi lawyer Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat Jr. (if that isn't the all-time greatest name-nickname combination, I don't know what is) on prohibition: "If by whiskey, you mean the water of life that cheers men's souls, that smooths out the tensions of the day, that gives gentle perspective to one's view of life, then put my name on the list of the fervent wets. But if by whiskey, you mean the devil's brew that rends families, destroys careers and ruins one's ability to work, then count me in the ranks of the dries." Maybe Soggy was wiser than we think; surely effect must be counted into any equation of good and evil.
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