"Mental" Notes: My Father Lives Here

The Plasma TV
We bought the 55-inch plasma television 5 years ago as a birthday present to the house. It's a large, black television, holstered on steel girders attached to the wall. It has permanent screen-in burn reduction of several rectangles near the bottom of the screen. After a night of unadulterated video game action, the black square radiates intense heat that could make a winter night as blazingly tepid as the summer solstice.

The Bookshelf 
My parents always had difficulty understanding what kind of furniture to get. They tried to impress visitors with really extravagant-looking pieces such as the defunct bookshelf. It sprouts from the desk like Botticelli’s shell, a gleaming white curtain with multiple layers. When it was filled with books, it was the most impressive-looking thing in the living room. Today, it's completely bare. Every scratch and dent is visible and its extravagance fades with age.

The Couch
My aunt had a white couch. After a few seconds of taste, she realized the couch wasn't suitable for her so she dumped it onto us. When the couch finally came to our doorstep, my brother and I rushed towards it and jumped and bounced on it. Today, it's my father's second bed and the dog's home away from home. It's been permanently stained with artificial juices and many spilled water bottles. But for the many vacations spent at home, it was the only place where we felt comfortable. After all, the couch let our asses flatten out onto the cushions and really, what more could we ask for?

The Dog Bed
We bought it for my dog Sonic after my mom suggested he should have a designated place to sleep. It's a leopard-spotted bed only about two feet long, two feet wide. It has a leopard paw on one side, and an opened slit on the other side. Before we left the house, my mom would remember to wash the bed every week; my dad was very busy with his job and left the bed sticky and filled with many uneaten bones. It always upset me since I constantly told him that Sonic shouldn't eat bones. More so than the rest of the dilapidated living room covered with dust and beer cans, I always felt really sorry that my dog would allow himself to sleep in such filth. I finally decided to wash his bed and remove all of the bones, only to find those bones in the exact same place the following week.

The Picture
On the desk where once there was all of my useless papers/drawings, now there are only 4 pictures of my brother and I and many unopened envelopes. One of the pictures is the most hastily made picture frame anyone could ever dare to give to another person. Both of us awkwardly fill up the picture frame and both of our heads just barely touch the corners. We both hold our most triumphant objects, my high school diploma and my brother's championship trophy while wearing our most casual outfits: designer t-shirts and shorts. The picture frame is two shades of blue, divided by dotted lines that crisscross across the frame at a casual speed. The pathetic image of the two boys swallowing their self-indulgence was hastily printed out minutes after remembering we forgot to get our father a gift. Dad doesn't know that. What he knows is that his sons were considerate enough to get him a present. It probably won't last very long, but for him, it'll last a lifetime.

Last summer, I took an online creative writing course for UCLA.  One of the assignments was to select 5 objects from our home and write a short description about them. It had been a year since my parents' separation and I was living in a cramped room with my mother and brother. For inspiration, I visited my father’s house. It was the first time I felt comfortable enough to visit by myself. When I took a brief glance at the living room as it was, I knew I had the objects for my assignment. Good reception from my online classmates and professor was enough motivation to expand the assignment into a full-length prose poem. To prepare, I took many pictures of the house and set aside an entire week to push out the poem. I started working on it at my friend’s house but I could only squeeze out little blips of phrases. It became more painful to divulge further into the disgraceful state of my father’s house. Despite what I’m describing, the poem wasn’t like an autopsy report. Instead, it was like recalling only the pleasant memories during a funeral for a loved one but never overlooking the lingering disease that always existed. What you’ve just read are the remnants of the poem, as I left it a year ago. Someone once told me how difficult writing is because of how personal it becomes. Never was this more true than with this assignment.

The family dogs, Shadow (left) and Sonic (right)

The Twentisecond One

Citrus Providers
When life gives you lemons, do the obvious. When life gives you grapefruit, throw it back since you don’t like it.  Sometimes, the grapefruit has rotted beyond repair, and catching it means getting the rotten, sticky pulp all over your hands. You go to the bathroom to get the pulp off but the unbearable stench remains, so you douse yourself with many different perfumes and finally, the awful stench disappears. You’ve had the stench for almost 2 weeks, and very little people have decided to stick around and suffer through the stench with you. But those are the good guys, the defiant ones; they’re the ones who’ll stick around longer than the terrible smell. You can never predict the whereabouts of the grapefruit; some of them appear out of nowhere and hit your chest incredibly hard, others are coughed up and spit out (luckily, they’re not rotten), and others have just fallen from the sky, splattered all over the floor. You recognize that these aren’t your grapefruit and take a moment to wonder if you should care about the floor grapefruit. Your first instinct is to clean it up, and throw it in the dumpster or in some kind of compost heap. Once you’ve done that, you can’t help but wonder about the other grapefruit that makes up the compost heap. You realize that people might’ve been hit by the exact same grapefruit, but it’s such an embarrassing thing to happen to a person, getting hit by grapefruit, that it doesn’t surprise you that no one else ever talks about it. In fact, upon realizing the amount of grapefruit in the compost heap, you get sick of saying the word grapefruit and resort to calling it “Citrus provider”, but oranges and tangerines are also “citrus providers” so now you’ve blurred your understanding of the term. You start having dreams of “citrus providers” raining from the sky. Upon seeing the rest of the world take advantage of the “citrus providers”, from practical juice-making means to ridiculous robot making means, you start attacking everybody and stealing their “citrus providers”. In the dream, you create an enormous basket and with your imaginary strength, you succeed in taking away everybody’s “citrus providers” and decide to jump into the basket and dwell within the pulps and juices of the “citrus providers”. You have the time of your life within the basket until others realize the existence of the basket breaks various zoning laws and have the basket destroyed by missile fire (since it’s a dream, you know). No one considers the explosion causes all of the “citrus providers” to pour out of the basket at once and engulf everyone in sight. You’re the lucky one, however, and are the only one alive after the missile fiasco, but you look around and clearly see how everyone perished, by the means of your precious “citrus providers”. The thought makes you insane and you wake up, before any further damage is caused. At this point, waking up in a moistened bed, you think about all of the grapefruits of the world and wonder why the grapefruits come and go that easily. It’s been two weeks since your last grapefruit hit you, but you start yearning for the grapefruit, praying and making ridiculous ceremonies to bring it back. One summer afternoon, the clouds are the same purple-orange that led to the “citrus provider” storm, and you smile and wait patiently, only to be disappointed by the rain, saddened by the reaction from others, and furious from being tricked by Mother Nature again. You go into a crazed madness that leads you to a farmer’s market, still open at Midnight, apparently, and smash up every “citrus provider” you can see. Lo and behold, the cops have arrived, forgotten their training, and hurl a grapefruit right at your face. The grapefruit smashes and opens up immediately, covering your whole face like a ski mask. You’re sitting in the back of the cop cruiser, having refused to remove the grapefruit from your face. The cops think you’re the most ridiculous lunatic they’ve ever had to arrest, but you’re not listening. You have your grapefruit back and that’s all that matters. After a while, the grapefruit slowly slides off of your face, and lands onto your handcuffed arms. It’s not the same grapefruit you remember, just a convincing impostor. Your eyes, filled with grapefruit pulp and tears, burn savagely, and your body crumbles. Your time in jail is thankfully a quick one, as it’s your first offense. As you sit in jail with the grapefruit mask next to you, you consider the grapefruits in the compost heap again.  You look at the grapefruit mask again.

Some grapefruits are the lucky ones.

-To my sister.­­­­­­­