Knock when Nobody is Home

Please deliver the pizza to this address and...

The Sound of a Dragging Shovel

I experienced a year-long program of taekwondo as a third grader. This is how I met three siblings that became family friends and learned how to count to ten in Korean. When my hometown hosted a talent show I not only performed my orange belt routine, I gave an encore showing of it with my eyes closed. I’m sure the audience appreciated the efforts I took to challenge myself even though I forgot to close my eyes until halfway through it. Sometimes I lamented missing a new television show called Cyberchase that aired at the same time as my class. Taekwondo taught me about discipline even if I wasn’t aware of the concept as a nine-year old.

One day in the future, I’ll ask Dr. Huntington for advice on writing a thesis about dopamine. She’ll drop her notepad by accident and I’ll catch a glimpse of the ideas she jots down about her clients. I’ll remember that Ms. Holloway says sorry even before it happens, how Mr. Carrasco wants a life of science but knows the names of more porn stars than scientists, and that Ms. Lacroix feels like she’d press the nuke button if having the knowledge is half the battle. After an awkward laugh, Dr. Huntington will confuse me with an excessive use of facts and prescribe that I take a taekwondo class that meets inside an excavated burial tomb, circa 17^th century native America.

 

Instructor Jerome Farfalle’s First Words to the Class

- Before martial arts, my life felt like carrying a bundle of laundry. Indeed, I’d attempt to pick up a dropped sock and a shirt would fall to the ground. I’d reach for that shirt and a pair of shorts would fall. I couldn’t hold on to everything, see. Laundry is a lot easier to pick up, though, than a troubled human experience. Does my symbolism resonate with you all?

Participant Two: “Quite so very well yes it does because every day I sell tires at work and sometimes the tires sell themselves because they’re the best tires money can buy and I enjoy selling tires but if I’m being honest Instructor Farfalle I have to mention that selling these tires every day drains my energy and I always feel tired because I’m constantly tired from selling tires and sometimes I’m too tired to sell tires.”

Participant One: “I agree one hundred and fifty percent, comrade. Up until yesterday, I avoided Russia’s frosty climate inside the worn-down plastic straw factory where I’ve worked the majority of my life. Sometimes the economy [plugs his nose] was hollower than assorted bendy straws, I tell you. Then yesterday arrived like extraterrestrial space ships and a rookie named Clint Stokes made mistakes with chemical solutions. I had to confront Russia’s frosty climate outside the burned-down plastic straw factory. That was the last straw for me, comrade.”

Myself: VOID

Participant Three: “Wooo, dawgy! Shoot, if that ain’t my life you’s describing than might as well just sip on psychosis until I run myself ragged. Like they say in New York City (New York City?), the humans that make it complicated don’t get congratulated. Hey now, I said I opened up a small diner called the Starving Brain and  made a variety of hotcakes but it turns out what they say in New York City (New York City?) about hotcakes isn’t true because they didn’t sell at all. Shoot.”

 

Conspiratorial Boogey Man

They may have said all this but I wasn’t there. It’s true that humans don’t get lost inside shopping malls because of maps signifying where they are, but no such luxury exists inside excavated burial tombs. An over-the-top sneeze could discombobulate the crumbling stone walls and I still wouldn’t know East from West. From behind, a daft breeze encourages shamanic beads, feathers, and wood effigies to sing like wind chimes and chalky dust qualified for AARP discounts fends off sunlight like yesterday’s tomorrow. Hi-yah! echoes from several of the 20,000 corridors but maybe they’re auditory mirages. Painted carvings and carved-out paintings too familiar for their own good chuckle stares as if they’re borrowing something from the present to explain the past. My blurry reflection confined inside a mirror notices the atoms of this body and pretends it’s a dream as I fall through the lucid glass. Consciousness returns ten paces ahead and in a massage-ready position with small beacons of white energy growing on a patch of grass to my right. I perceive four metal shovels dissecting the area of cellular dirt where chandeliers happen to live and dirt sprinkles onto my back like brown parmesan cheese.

 

X-rays of People Laughing

Her dress was made of evening sky and affirmed that culture might be the manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Biologists want to believe it’s the cultivation of bacteria in an artificial medium containing nutrients. Alas, her skeletal face said this culture invoked the image of perfect teeth - superficial pearls that slowly move a little each night regardless of using a retainer. /// She blamed society until they said she was society so she left society.

 

The Ladder of Involvement as a Social Reality

The discovery of FUN enabled humans to construct a stratified society where objective achievements often contradicted subjective satisfaction. Initial research conducted in South Africa suggested that individuals who consumed minimal amounts of FUN, increased the likelihood of objective achievement. Their results noted several areas of collateral damage: augmented delusions of grandeur, diminished levels of altruism, and acute symptoms of imminent demise. Some humans decided to be more financially involved than others and sold FUN as a commodity to those who sought subjective satisfaction. As FUN continued to age, its inherent lack of traditional beauty took refuge behind a false veneer described as ADVERTISING. Critics of this engineered dichotomy worry that humans miss out on an experience looking for something else.

 

A Ticklish Situation according to History

As the year progressed, the training remained the same. Towards the end, a new student who went by Boredom joined our class and I told him that’s exactly how I feel. He replied that things won’t be boring until you decide to think they are. I was one achievement away from earning a green belt when the year expired so I finished with a bittersweet feeling about taekwondo. From the perspective of a third grader, it was not doing the things you wanted to do in the present in order to accomplish other things in the future. But what if the idea of my present being a constant routine that only thinks about the future worries me?

Author's Note

Comments are highly appreciated

Reviews

[Rana]

Could be like leaving a message when they're not around so you don't have to face them. The shovel hit insight, digging into memory with the pen shovel, haha. The characterizations stand out, the one line descriptions of the adults in the beginning, the dialogues of the participants where the distinct voices are so real they make the writer's voice go perfectly invisible. I liked the laundry symbolism and seeing them relate to it differently and all those gorgeous puns. The descriptions of the inside of the tomb were aesthetic, humorous, loved the titles and best the one describing skeletons, the culture pun, the suicide, and I got really pensive agreeing with the critics of the dichotomy mentioned. Maybe a snippet of the thesis on dopamine. Reflective stuff Gaston :)

[Gaston Villanueva]

Thanks for the review, Rana! It really helps me notice things about my writing that I may have overlooked.