Tiny Pantry

The waking nightmare: something kills you slower but doesn’t give you any new lines to speak with your extra time. So I go back over the old dialogue and hunt for Easter eggs.

Once in an undergrad writing workshop I prayed for a professor to make me drop to the ground and start doing push-ups till they either screamed at me to give them twenty more or to get the hell out of their sight. Either way I wouldn’t have to hear the word liminal or the phrase but have you earned that ending again. Sometimes, I just want to take space that’s for beauty and make it do work.  

Same with our wedding day. At the last minute, I asked my mom to braid my hair in the parking garage outside of the courthouse. I wore a dress that I bought with the Twin Peaks revival (and not marriage) in mind. I didn’t look like a princess, I looked like myself. It was myself that was marrying you. 

 

Even when we planned our wedding party much later, it was pieced together with patches, held at the restaurant where I worked. The kitchen boys made Korean fried chicken and handmade pierogies and kimchi pancakes. Dre made a huge vat of mezcal punch and Jaime baked a cake with the last of the season’s rhubarb. It wasn’t about if the marriage was going to work. The wedding worked. We made a playlist with Put It On Me and Love Will Tear Us Apart on it and failed to see the dual omens we were flirting with--but the ripped internet failed after ten songs, and we put Sade on the boombox instead. The Sade CD was there because the entire restaurant staff agreed to bump it during Mother’s Day brunch. We reasoned that it was the one album that every last one of our mothers loved.

The waking nightmare is that whether or not you earned this ending, it’s the one we got. In January, you will have been dead for four years. You were not always good at practicing kindness in the house, but you told me the cure for everything was to get out of the house, anyway. That’s where people loved you. Out. Driving around with extra coats in the car, picking up hacks, giving away cameras (or other people’s motorcycles) to dudes you met once. Asking a stranger for a lighter and then spending the day with them, or moving in with them, or dating their daughter, or inheriting their busted old Cadillac. So I dedicate this space to you: Not a princess. 

(Food in the Tiny Cabinet is free to anyone who’d like it for these two weeks. Please feel free to add anything nonperishable you have to spare, and please tell your undergrad students.)

Essay in which I overthink about what I have no control over so I think / and think / and think

No one can guarantee that I won’t lose another home to a fire even if I check and check again that the stove is off every time I go out / even if I unplug everything that doesn’t need to be plugged in at night like the air freshener I keep in the living room, or the microwave when I can’t rinse away the end-of-the-world type of feelings that sometimes visit me at night / and on those nights, paranoid, awake, no one can guarantee that no one will break into my apartment / pummel down the front door, chain and all / shatter the window in my bedroom that is too close to my bed and too large, too easy to jump in and out of / on those nights I triple check that I have all three locks on the front door / sometimes I wake up just to go check the door is locked / and when extra paranoid I press a chair or a heavy box of books up against my bedroom door so that I can at least hear as the intruder breaks into my room, so that they struggle for a second / and for that second I can pretend I am brave enough to run or fight back / though I am not strong / I know I’m not.

All this to say that lack of control terrifies me. It exhausts my mind and body when I can’t anticipate if something bad will happen. Or when it will happen because my mind usually assumes all the bad it imagines will be real / there is no if / it’s all a matter of when it will happen / we were as careful as we could be and we still lost our home to a fire because we had no way of knowing that our TV service provider had done a bad job of setting up the wiring outside of our home / all it took was a couple years of wear and tear and some rain-snow to create a spark.

I like folding origami aliens because I’ve been folding them for years. I know what mistakes to avoid. I know when an alien is going to tear. I know when to give up, and sometimes I convince myself that knowing when to give up is what I need. Though reimagine with me, toss out the negativity: I like folding origami aliens because I know how to work with my mistakes. I have control over the paper. Step-by-step, I can anticipate what my folding is leading to. There is no surprise, though yes, I will sometimes mess up and some origami aliens will be imperfect. Some will struggle to stand once completed, but even if they wobble, so long as they stand is what should matter. I succeeded. I didn’t have to give up. I am okay.

calamity in 6 colors

1. yellow 

as in yellow! my name is knife. just gonna squeeze on by ya: midwestern greeting between the 4th and 5th rib. do you mind if turn my head into a giant staircase, and you, the protagonist of our story, roll down and out where my mouth ought to be? 

good god, i am falling in love with the way i let things lie 

2. blue

oscillation / isolation
simple slept in weapon 
pistachio, moustache, pastiche, succotash, ganache, panache

sung: these are some of my favorite things. 

3. green 

i was smart until i became pope, then everything changed. first your hair becomes grey. they tell you that. but they don’t tell you your insides go gray, too. i can peek the steel with a long hard stare down my throat—can see see it creeping up like aluminum moss.  

i wanted to be a part of the city, but instead the city became part of me, and no, it doesn't go both ways. and no, i don't sing when i'm alone anymore, and yes, my head has gained 13 lbs of raw metal, and yes, i will live another day, but no, not w/ you 

4. red

Burn something down and call it a candle. Burn everything down and call it a séance. Gesture toward r(e)u(n)i(o)n.   

Look both ways before you look both ways. 

5. orange

when you close your mouth, my heart is like a fisted sock.  

6. white

keep in mind the closest exit may be behind you 

do you feel you have taken

one step forward, then two more 

steps in the same direction facing backward 

does it taste like anything 

to be so wrong about everything 

or just your usual mouth 

is it your usual mouth 

because you feel like you are always 

so wrong about everything 

do you pretend to love 

your mother 

with that mouth 

what about light 

& seeing the fact of things 

is so embarrassing 

when something disappears 

don’t you think

you know it a little better 

what does my willingness

to hide from my life say about my attitude 

toward those who choose to stay 

do you think a miracle 

is something 

that just happens 

do you think in the future 

you will say 

something, anything to me 

how is the phrase ghost pipe

both a flower & an accurate description 

of my loving surrender 

anything that pleases you should 

be miraculous when 

everything else displeases 

i think if i could give you anything 

it would be one pleasure 

or one amnesia 

if i had control over the world 

nobody would ever go bald 

vote for me 

if i ever go bald 

i will invent a new person 

to be angry at 

i need an image 

but when i imagine anyone 

your face spills on it 

River / Water

1. Water Front

On rainy days my mom would take us to the Museum of Natural History. At that time, there were only permanent exhibits. Still, every time it felt new. 

Across from the information desk and next to the big stairway, a small glass case much like this one, full of passenger pigeons. The rest of the museum was down the stairs. Musty halls of mystery, all winding their way back to now. 

I grew up in an old city. I grew up in an old house. The paper mill had long been closing; it would be a decade still til the valves were shut. Years, ten more, until the smokestacks scrapped. But even then, what is a shadow? 

The chain link stayed around the site. But I believed I could see through it. The curtains had opened a hundred year dark. Gray waves lapped a mile of shoreline. Young trees breathed their first light of the low orange western sun. 

At what age do we begin to learn that time and space are functions? Parabolas were paths I knew first by walking slowly. “Travel through the Depths of Time and see the plants and animals!” Cambrian. Devonian. Permian. Triassic. An ice age melts into itself and becomes a shallow sea. Miocene. Pliocene. Pleistocene. Holo. Dense tropics dry to desert.

Was it when I turned around to look for mom? Three epochs away and around the bend, yet somehow straight behind me? Or was it in Habitats re-learning “what calls them home,” transfixed by the epoxy?

 

2. Exhibit Materials 

Tire tube 

Plastic water bottles

Plastic scraps of unknown objects 

Pill bottle 

Plush

Budlight can

Budweiser can 

Dr. Pepper can

Smirnoff can, Strawberry Lemon 

Light beer can of unknown origins 

Aluminum scraps

Unlabeled tin cans 

blue plastic plate from a child’s toy dish set 

Sunglass lens 

Safety goggle lens 

Pair of sunglasses 

Nike shoe 

Horseshoe 

Men’s work glove 

Women’s work glove

Blue jean pocket 

Flannel shirt cuff 

Collared infant sweater 

Wire fragments 

Iron fragments 

Kitchen trash bag 

Plush 

Land survey stake 

Blue surgical mask 

Blue plastic straws 

Cotton strips with faded geometric patterns 

Coca-cola glass shards

Unidentifiable glass shards 

Ceramic fragments 

Silk flower petals 

Giant Express Rewards key tag

Plastic human figurine 

Black spiral bound notebook cover

Bouquet of brittle brush flowers

Butterfly wings, Sleepy Orange Sulphur 

 

 

3. Old News

The fact that the Santa Cruz River is dry most of the year is nothing new. Two small blue pills are nothing new. Then four. Then five aren’t either. The fact that the river was not always like this is not something new. 

Trash in the Santa Cruz River is nothing new. When it rains and every wash in town drains its contents there, the trash heaps are, at first, alarming. Not the usual highway heaps. But entire streets that appear to have been swallowed, churned up, spewed out. Couches, mattresses, car doors, 2x4s. Not long after though, nothing new. 

The fact that ads are fucked is nothing new. You are just so used to scrolling over on your phone or passing them on the highway that turning the pages of a magazine one morning has you lingering. Objects connect. Hermes. Welcome to the road to happiness. Illy Coffee. For people who could use a triple lift. Neutrogena. What if your phone learned, adapted, evolved, and became a reflection of you? Google Pixel. 

Monsoon rains are nothing new. But 2020 was my first year in Tucson and that summer it never rained. This year when the monsoons came and the rivers swelled and the hills turned green, everything once again felt like magic. 

Sometimes being reminded of what you think you already know is annoying. Like when you’re a kid being told and then retold: before you go outside to play you have to wash the dishes. Or when you’re feeling pulled down an unpaid road, but your phone dings ten til meeting. Other times the reminder leaves you weeping, amazed that nearing 30 years old, you still don’t know how to listen. Grateful, though, something deep is still there to remind you. 

4. Collecting Notes

I found myself most afraid to reach for the things I was afraid to find. The fear: that each battered shoe might contain a foot Or that each cotton strip unearth a whole garment. Sand has a weight that provokes every question. 

Eyes cast down roving rock studded sand, I slipped into the waters of a long forgotten joy. Evening beach comb, Childhood, Lake Michigan. 

Here was another return address: I reached for most quickly anything small and blue. 

Bad Phantoms: An Exhibit of Pataphysical Heartforms

 

Body of Water

50% >3,000m depth, other dimensions immeasurable; see coastline paradox. Range from high disturbance (longitudinal and transversal waves) to stagnancy (stillwater).

Heart of Palm

6≥dig/can, >1 hand. Stem, core, central softness; swamp cabbage or millionaire's salad, a gamble.

Prickly Pear

≤ 6sp/areole, opuntia engelmannii. Flowering May-June, spined year-round, clefted sporadically. Pyriform, carmine fruit.

Firework

16+ only. Arterial lumina. Customizable shapes, colors, sizes (list of possible specs avail at request). Detonation warning, murmur, use at your own risk.

Monsoon

2.5 inches, H20, dust, dewpoint, light, flash, flood. Grandiose expressivity in response to minute climate shifts (rich network of reliance made visible). 

Spear

85 kJ/100g; a. officinalis, sparrowgrass, points d'amour (love tips) or kuşkonmaz (bird won’t land). Succulent (adjectival sense); adventitious, fasciculate root system.  

Clock

60s/m, 60 m/h; grandfather, face, 2-3 hands. Expert horologist; superior self-regulation; steady HR with minimal subjective deviation.

Two-Step

2/4 or 4/4, >130bpm; QQS, QQSS, QQSQQS. Whiskey Road, premier high energy country music nightclub midweek dance party every Wednesday (free lessons Thursday at 7). 

Heart on a Sleeve*

45 bpm, three-chambered heart; compact myocardium typical of most ectothermic vertebrates. Viperid, squamate.

Hummingbird*

1,260 bpm; extreme aerobic endurance, ideal model for tap dancers, pure spirits, anxious blurs.

Moth*

60-100 bpm; lepidoptera. Crepuscular, diurnal, paraphylectic. Feathered, varied, non-club antennae. Known fashion-devourer, lover of light.

Sunset

26m. to civil twilight, angle and atmosphere dependent. Bands of ROYGBIV fade to black, ecstatic ending.

Fleabag*

354bpm, resilin, chitin. Ideal model for states of chronic autonomic cardiovascular arousal in bodies of parasitic lifelong hunger.

Free-Tail*

40-200 bpm (not as quick on the rev as uroderma bilobatum, 20-1,000 bpm, hibernation/flight dependent). Ideal slow-rev compact aerial model. Nocturnal.

Abstract:

There are some manipulations science can’t or shouldn’t perform on an animal or human heart, or too many variables that arise in their testing, which we can eliminate through a more predictable model. So we create a phantom heart, a stand-in for what we want to study. Something that is reproducible. A heart allegory built from that slime children play with, for instance; gelatin with electrified sensors placed inside to stimulate, to simulate a beating heart. Or a fake cadaver manufactured from chemicals, salts, and dyed synthetics. This is what we mean by a phantom, something that looks or acts like what we’re hoping to study. 

Trying to think up a solution for missing you, I made a list of pataphysical phantom heartforms, mine and yours. Bodies of bugs, dead and living; tapestries of feathers, disembodied wings; collages of trash loose on the street. I made more and longer entries as the summer passed. Stones, cacti paddles, nonsimultaneous light. Pyrotechnic stars inside their shells; clocks cognizant of their finite lifespans; pomegranates split open on the ground. I wanted to study each alternate form to see where these alternates resonated, where they felt short or overcompensated; to glean what I could about heartforms in general. Some of those heartforms are collected here.

To know x = to know (everything - x), wrote René Daumal. This equation summarized his theory of pataphysics, "the science of imaginary solutions" (Jarry). Only in taking the most alien forms seriously could I hope to gain a serious understanding of the very familiar. Only in becoming a scientist of bad phantoms could I hope to learn something about anything real. 

Sometimes it is convenient to think that your heartform is the only one of its kind that can break in the specific way your heart has broken, but the pataphysical laboratory’s evidence proves otherwise: that every heartform holds such a fury and can love exactly as fervently as your heart has—that your heart’s loved and misses one such as itself (scared alien glitter-lipped pizza-eater).

Perish or Publish / All Hail the Tone Commander

 

Why do I love such unbeloved things? I speak here of the touch tone, push button office phones I rescued from my university’s heading-to-surplus pile. I saw them in a box labeled GOING TO SURPLUS and I was thrilled and sad. We still have office phones, of course, though I don’t think anyone ever uses theirs. Our office phone numbers are listed in the directory and you can call me on it if you look me up. If I am in my office I usually pick it up, albeit with suspicion. Over the past five years, 90% of the phone calls I received in my office were from a colleague who died early in April 2019, very early indeed in the pandemic. I don’t know if his death was caused by covid or was not, or how to fully disambiguate the two. His obituary did not list a cause of death and everyone was pretty isolated when he passed. It was sad. He was a pain in the ass, the kind of guy who refused to participate in many aspects of university life on principle. Publish? Who cares. Perish? He did. I think of him when I think of phones. 

The first three phones I rescued from the surplus pile are off-white. Two of them have brown backgrounds behind the keys. Two have phone numbers written on them: 621-6214 and 621-7406. The other has a torn orange sticker on the cradle saying EMERGENCY / Suspicious Activity / “report it” / 9-911 [from 621 prefix] or 911 and I can’t read the rest. 

Rescued may be overstating the case. Who cares about these outmoded phones with their stretched-out handset coils that once I imagine fingers tangled in while talking. Everyone has cell phones anyhow. My friend Manuel even gives his cell number to his students, which seems like a stretch to me, but it works for him. 

That we call the part you put the handset in the cradle, as in infant’s, suggests their former value. That the plastic buttons the handset depressed when you laid it in the cradle were nearly always translucent white or clear is a memory that may go away and that no one besides me and my dead friend Charles may mourn. 

The phone remains to me an object of erotic interest. They were once—and still are, I’m sure—a portal to sex or porn. That’s not what I’m talking about here, however. 

Because I took the phones from the surplus pile a sign popped up a couple days later from the administrative staff: “please email annes1 before going through or adding to this pile. Thnx” which I took as a rebuke. I’ve arrived at the point where saving something dying deserves rebuke for what I’m sure are sound administrative reasons. They would explain if I asked. I do not ask. I do not care. I know no one loves these phones. 

Also who abbreviates “thanks” “Thnx”?

I also saved—I don’t know why I’m telling you this—a Panasonic “Integrated Telephone System” with a “Data Port,” an AT&T digital answering machine that I had myself circa 1999, a crappy vtech cordless phone and, my favorite, if just based on the name, one that’s labeled TONE COMMANDER. I’ll let that sink in for a second. With this phone you command the fucking tones!

I found it online. It’s a TEO Tone Commander 8620U-01B 20-button ISDN phone, which it looks like you can find refurbished for…$325. I guess it could be the 8610 which is a hundred dollars cheaper. The user manual announces that its features include AutoSPID and Parameter Download, programmable SOFTKEYS, Direct Station Selection, and a bunch of other things that only mean something to a very specific sort of administrative staff person. I can imagine the power one must feel as Tone Commander with the Tone Commander at your fingertips, programmable and programmed, multiple lines lit up by lights, slinging calls to faculty offices, all things under control.

There was a time when you would not have been wrong to call me Tone Commander, phone phreak that I was for at least a few years in which I rewired Radio Shack instruments to take control of pay and other phones to use them for my purposes which were mostly to call long distance to friends for free. The magic of it, which is to say the hack, was the trick: I didn’t have much money so I couldn’t have afforded to talk too much long distance otherwise anyhow, but I’m not sure I cared that much about it that I would have paid to do so anyhow. I called girls, friends, girlfriends, and friends of girls. Hence, perhaps, the erotic attachment to the unbeloved phone. 

Now who talks on these phones, even on the Tone Commander? A cell, perhaps, collapses distances, but a wired phone? Until the cell service spots out in my dad’s rural town I don’t see any use for it, and only then I do. The Tone Commander gives me options: CALL, SETUP, DONE, MORE>, TRAN, CONF, DROP, MUTE, SPKR, and HOLD. It commands up to 10 lines of tones which is probably why you can still buy them online. Institutions may be the only remaining home for phones like these, but our institution has banished it to surplus.

I carved this little space out of my decaying institution and I hold it dear, a little bulwark against the loss of what often feels like everything that matters. I call it the Tiny Cabinet. You can find it here at the.tinycabi.net. It is a cabinet for tiny things. Also a tiny cabinet itself. It is where I installed the phones I took from the surplus pile without permission. It is this thing you're reading. It’s a small rebellion, this one, to have temporarily reserved these phones from the surplus where they go before they eventually get transferred to the trash or to recycling. It probably deserves no notice for its li'l (not even little) heroism. 

I don’t mean to gnash my teeth at progress. My department was and perhaps is still paying something like $90,000 a year to the university to keep phone service in every faculty office. (We may step back to note that the university’s latest budget model tallies up all the things it provides, for a fee of course, against the money the department brings in from students, less administrative fees, so while something like phones may seem like a basic thing a university ought to provide, it is no longer so: the department has to pay for its phones, to the tune of $90,000.)

When we were trying to cut costs a few years back to the point where the then-department-chair’s solution was for all the faculty to make after-tax donations to the department fund to avoid having to lay off staff and only the junior faculty did (unsurprisingly), I said why don’t we just give up our phones?

We had no voicemail anyway. I’d never had voicemail in my office here, which was half blessing and half inconvenience. It turned out it would cost more to get rid of the phones, which would entail (somehow) having to have the phone lines removed from the office walls (why, I asked, and don’t remember the answer: why not just give up the phones). Your only option, if you wanted voicemail, was to get an answering machine, like this one my friend Manuel had, which may be why he gives the students his number. He’d brought his from home, I think, though maybe they’d given it to him. Maybe this machine is from his office. I had no inkling you could requisition one from the university, though now you can, apparently, at least thanks to surplus, or you could if I were to release this answering machine from the Tiny Cabinet and put it back in the box. 

If I don’t let the phones go, maybe they can’t take the whole pile to surplus. Maybe the world will slow. After all I did not save the cords. So the cords in the boxes sit there in a box a dozen feet away, separated from the phones. That box is for surplus. This box is for art. This is a display and also a resistance, if a small one. A little museum I made of this cabinet opposite my dead colleague’s former office door. Now his office is empty and it’s labeled ITEM FOR SURPLUS, referring to, I presume, the stuff inside the office, which is locked. 

"Made in the USA, the Tone Commander’s flagship endpoint is the TSG-6 IP phone which meets the stringent requirements of the Committee on National Security Systems and is compliance tested and approved by the National Telecommunications Security Working Group. The Tone Commander TSG-6 IP Phone is a non-proprietary AS-SIP endpoint which interoperates with most relevant Session Border Controllers." [source]

The Return of the Tiny Cabinet

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