Rivers

When I walked past the old man for the first time, I didn't see him. I noticed him, caught a glimpse of his raggedy jacket, his disheveled beard, his yellow fingernails stained presumably from a lifetime of smoking whatever cigarettes he managed to finagle from passersby. His brown corduroy pants were baggy and there were holes in both knees. The brimmed hat covering his long, thinning hair was crookedly dangling toward his droopy left ear. For all I knew, he was the same homeless man I had seen in Sligo, Brussels, and Berlin. He looked no different from the man who wanted pot in Amsterdam or the smelly Czech scavenger who wanted me to buy him a fifth of Stoli in Prague. But then again, I didn't really see him.

I had been on the road for over a month before I made it to Florence. I had survived Irish food, Irish rain, and Irish drinking. I had survived the huge pile of excrement that found my shoe on the cold pavement in Belgium. I even managed to survive my steep, slippery hike to the Fortress on the Monchsberg during a blizzard in Salzburg despite a runny nose and an empty stomach.

In between foreign cities and unsolicited examinations of fortitude, I found sleep on trains.

It wasn't always good sleep. On my way from Zurich to Venice I was rudely awakened by an Italian kid on a sugar high that went unfulfilled when he lost his cookies on the table in the booth we shared. I didn't get an apology from the boy or the Eurail employee who aided in cleanup, but I did get an inspired journal entry out of the ordeal.

The small cabin I shared in the train from Rome to Paris awakened both me and my claustrophobia. Fifteen hours and I hardly slept a wink. I guess the one drawback of traveling alone was the slight paranoia I just couldn't shake. I'm not untrusting, but the snowballing stories of pick-pocketers and the post 9/11 uproar over "evil" Americans certainly heightened my senses.

The worst night of sleep came in Galway, Ireland, not on a train but rather courtesy of the run-down Galway hostel. Mysterious shadows darted across the room for an eternity, bopping to the music of their voices echoing down the hallway. The constant drip of the faucet in the corner of the room provided the bass for the foreign concert of activity. I slept fully clothed that night, with my shoes on my feet and my backpack secured around my waist to ensure I was ready for whatever confrontation may occur. Nothing ever did.

Some nights I slept like a baby, or better yet as my sister would say, I slept like a teenage boy. Those uninterrupted slumbers were usually preceded by a night on the town. There were the techno clubs in Germany that never closed and the parties in Venice for Carnival that never ended.

My best night of sleep may have come in Amsterdam. I had met a group of Brits who worked security at Gatwick airport. We skipped around town, watching futbol and drinking beer. They would tell me funny stories about failed security breaches and I would share my tales of daily conflict with the sushi chef I worked with back home. (I wanted him to make sushi for my customers; he wanted to finish watching Walker, Texas Ranger.) Our common stories made us friends for the night, and that's usually all I needed.

Sleep or no sleep, the constant originality of my new life was refreshing. I was on my own and out of my comfort zone. And I was thriving.

Good and bad, these were the experiences I had hoped for when I booked a one way ticket to find myself. And until I made it to Florence, I hadn't realized just how lost I had become.

The old man approached me as I veered over the Ponte Vecchio Bridge to the stunningly beautiful Arno River below. I had become transfixed by a flock of birds hovering over the water, staring at them for what must have been ten minutes. I had walked out of my hostel, down the cobblestone street, past the shops, the restaurants, and the old man, until I found that perfectly flat lookout area on the bridge to reflect on my travels as they neared an end and record my thoughts in a journal.

The birds were mesmerizing. They flew randomly, but in unison - it was the first time I ever witnessed poetry in motion. I didn't know enough about birds to tell you what kind they were, but their soft white feathers glistened in the morning sun. They glided gracefully above the water, and I was positive they were flying just for me. The leaders of the flock would alternate the lead spot seamlessly and effortlessly, as if they had spent the night choreographing their post dawn flight. My eyes never strayed from the ballet of the birds, and my mind raced for words to describe the scene.

The old man interrupted my trance with his request, first in Italian, then in English.

"Scusi," he said.

When I realized he was talking to me, I conjured up the only Italian sentence in my imaginary library.

"No parlo Italiano," I said without turning my head.

"Do you have cigarette?" the man continued, spotting my English accent.

"Yeah, here. Have the pack. I don't smoke much anyway." I felt relieved to rid my pocket of the deadly sticks and guilty they now belonged to someone else. As I handed him the pack I looked at his face. His eyes were clear and more focused than I ever would have guessed. I could sense his gratitude through his eyes alone. He opened the box with one hand like a pro and shook a single smoke loose.

"Thank you, sir," he replied. As he brought the cigarette toward his lips I noticed an old wound on his chin. I had fun guessing the story behind the scar. Maybe he got drunk and cut it open on the cobblestone streets. Maybe he fought the last tourist to deny his habit. Maybe, early in his life, before it turned sour, he had caught an accidental cleat in his face in a pickup game of futbol at the park.

I turned back to the river but knew my concentration, my meditation, had been disturbed to the point of no return. The man had lit his cigarette and taken a drag, and before he exhaled he murmured those 8 words I will never forget.

"Don't stare too long...at the same river," he said in a slow but unmistakably perfect English accent.

Those words stung me like a prizefighter surprised by a timely uppercut.

Just as quickly as the man had approached, he turned his back to me, exhaled his breath of carbon dioxide and various poisons, and walked away. I stood still, my mind racing to make sense of his message. How long had he been watching me? Was he being literal? Did he know me? Was he sitting with me at the computer, the day I bought my plane tickets in an effort to leave my monotonous life behind? He had to have been there. Perhaps he was the voice in my head come to life at the very moment I was pondering my own.

"Don't stare too long...at the same river."

My life was at a crossroad, or better yet, the convergence of two rivers. I was going home in one week, but what was home? Salt Lake was beginning to feel less and less like home. I loved home, loved my friends, loved the mountains, hell I even loved living in a city people don't want to visit. Good, I thought. Stay away. If people find out how great this city really is, it will become crowded and lose what it is I love about it. The mountains, the hiking, the skiing, the memories of growing into a man - home has everything I need. But something was missing.

The more time I spent on the Ponte Vecchio Bridge after my chance encounter with the wise old man, the more I understood his message. I was settling. I was standing in place. I wasn't chasing my dreams; they were floating above me, out of reach, in the thin mountain air. I needed a change. Change isn't forgetting your past, who you are and where you come from. Change is embracing your past and using it to mold your future. Take life lessons, learn from them, replicate the good ones and prove that the bad ones didn't happen in vain.

I knew I'd leave Salt Lake that day. I'd moved on. Life had mapped out a different path, and I was finally ready to follow the lesson plan. Four years later, I have zero regrets.

I never got to thank the old man that cold winter day in Italy, but I've thanked him every day since. He lives inside me.

Every time I see a river, I make sure not to stare too long.

Chocolate Disdain, Explained

*A special thanks to Ami Nguyen for coming through like kindling and igniting my hatred for the cocoa bean and his partner in crime - the peanut.

Forestero. Criollo. Trinitario. All three have made the trip across the sea, into the factory, onto the melting pan, through the shape machine, into the wrapper, out the door, onto the truck, placed in a bin, picked off the shelf, brought home to a kid, opened by grimy fingers, and devoured like a praying mantis eating her mate. Bad example? Possibly. But equally unappealing.

Those three foreign cacao trees produce enough cocoa beans to plant a Hershey-sized kiss on every man, woman, and child on earth. But for me, it would be one of those awkward kisses where you don't kiss back and then it just smears and no one is happy. You see, I hate chocolate. I can handle the taste from time to time, but it's one candy that comes with just enough baggage to force me to avoid it on non-holiday days. It gets stuck on the roof of your mouth, it coats your teeth to give you that big British smile, it's rich, it melts and inevitably stains the shirt you just got for your birthday, and it's EVERYWHERE YOU TURN!

I'm always offered chocolate and I always decline. And everytime I do I know what's coming.

"Are you sure? It's reeallly good. I got it from Switzerland!"

"No, I'm good. Thanks for the offer though."

"Did you hear what I said? It's swiss chocolate! It's a Toblerone!"

"I'm sorry, I don't really like chocolate."

Long pause. Mouth opens. Storm clouds roll in. Thunder rages. Eyes turn red.

"You..(gasping for breath)... don't..(blank stare)...like...(eyes moistening)... CHOCOLATE!?!? (screaming)".

I don't mind that redundant conversation. Actually, I find it amusing. We've come a long way as a society. Neil and Buzz landed on the moon. Alexander found a way to talk to people that weren't sitting right in front of him. Jack learned how to make your problems temporarily dissappear. (Daniels for any mormons reading my blog). But here we are, in the 21st century, in a globalized world, and not one single person on this planet understands that I'd just as soon get a papercut on my eye than eat a milk chocolate bar after dinner.

The same goes for the peanut, or any nut for that matter.

I hate nuts so bad I'm not even going to risk the sharp rise in blood pressure trying to explain it.

There is one exception though. In fact, this exception is so frickin' mind-boggling that I've devoted an entire blog to figuring it out. Hell, I've devoted my whole life to figuring this out. No one believes me. They think I'm lying. They think I'm so far out of my bird that they'd never dare cage me. Do you want to know what it is? Well, I'll tell you anyway.

Four words: Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Sweet baby Jesus those are delicious. And addicting. I can't buy bags anymore. I'll eat right through 'em. I mean, I'm a sharer and I once told someone I was fresh out of cups because I couldn't bear to part with the remaining ten. It's a problem. It's an embarrassement. It's a contradiction.

The only rational explanantion is beyond my vocabulary, but I'm sure it has something to do with science. Math, too. You know how if you were to write out the equation of two multiplied by one half, and show your work, you would draw a line through the two "2's" because they cancel out? Yeah, its something like that, only instead of numbers, we're talking proteins and transfats.

You can write it down and say it loud. Thomas Stuyvesant doesn't like chocolate, and he doesn't like peanuts, but he likes chocolate and peanuts.

They say taste buds are shaped like cubes. I guess mine are Rubik's cubes.

Marlin and Me

The bubbles have stopped. And for the mean time, Tom's world has done the same.

Marlin's family always knew that their mentor, their rock, their inspiration - the foundation they based their tragically short lives - would one day share the same fate. They just didn't think it would take this long. As their lifeless bodies spiraled down the shiny porcelain passage toward an unknown abyss, they experienced emotions ranging from fear to relief to animosity. Fear of the possibility of no afterlife. Relief that hell on earth was over. Animosity toward their neglectful owner.

They couldn't help but think that it didn't have to be this way. When they first flopped fins into their new home (a sprawling estate with brand new pebbles and a spacious pirate cove), they envisioned lives of leisure. Sh*thead and F*ckface naturally took on parental roles as the elder statesmen. They had plans. Sh*thead gurgled about weekends by the filter. F*ckface babbled about swimming lessons for Whitney and Bobby. They would take vacations near the surface and snack on high protein flakes. But it all changed one day. In fact, it all changed THAT day.

Unbeknownst to the self-titled "Six Strangers" that met in the tank that day, a pinch of food distributed amongst three pairs of fish would naturally kickstart their survival instincts as they fought for available sustenance, regardless of the impenetrable relationships they thought they had forged in a day's time.

In a sense, Marlin's initial survival could be attributed to location. He was in the right place at the right time.

The same could not be said for Bobby, who perished first when he awoke from a nap in the cove to discover that dinner was served and he wasn't sitting at the table. Whitney was next to go, having only managed to suck down a single flake in the feeding mayhem. Jumpy the water frog and the aforementioned Sh*thead, an algae sucking plychausomus, attributed Whitney's death to the unmanageable pain of losing her soul mate, but an autopsy would later reveal an empty stomach to be the culprit.

F*ckface managed to appear on day two, but unfortunately for him, food did not. He was belly up by noon and tension was rapidly spreading throughout the tank. Marlin briefly grieved over the death of his brother, but knew he needed to conserve energy - a lesson taught to him by Fat John, a goldfish he met in Petsmart who had survived the Anderson famine just one year prior. As darkness fell, Marlin led the three remaining survivors in prayer, huddled in a corner and desperate to repent for their sins.

Jumpy struggled through the night. He was delirious, having not eaten in two days due to his fish flake allergy. Sh*thead had taken to sucking pebbles, normally frowned upon in the fish community but tolerated in times of distress. Meanwhile, Marlin stood defiant, determined to make it to his next meal.

That next meal came in the form of fresh water in a new tank. A few of the dead bodies had lingered in the old tank for several hours before the claw could take them to their maker, so the ensuing decomposition left harmful bacteria which infiltrated every nook and cranny of their home. Jumpy had been a lost cause by morning, battling starvation and dysentary, so Marlin and Sh*thead were quarantined in a Popcorn bowl.

At that point, it appeared as though Marlin and Sh*thead were in the clear. They were finally fed and their meal was big enough for seconds, and sweeter than mom's home regurgitation. They found strength and solace in each other, and decided to stick together in honor of their fallen comrades. Marlin would be there for Sh*thead, and Sh*thead for Marlin. Or so Marlin thought. The truth of the matter was that Sh*thead was dying. And he knew he was dying. But he had to trick Marlin into thinking that survival was even an option, so he feigned health to boost morale.

It worked for a day or two, but science eventually overcame. Sh*thead was pronounced dead at 10:04 am that day. He was the penultimate survivor of the "Six Strangers", and the fifth to succumb to starvation.

And then there was one.

Marlin's remaining weeks were equal parts sheer will to survive and miraculous. He quickly acclimated to an inconsistent feeding schedule and even thrived during Tom's intentionally unintentional assasination attempt, where he skipped town for a week but left an amount of food in the tank that would have prevented the tragedy altogether had he adopted this style earlier. Marlin's rationing strategy was textbook, eating only what he needed to survive, knowing that the floating flakes would need to last an unknown period of time.

Tom eventually returned to Portland and Marlin hoped that compassion would eventually return to Tom. But it wasn't to be. A man who didn't want fish in the first place was an unlikely candidate for Aquarium Owner of the Year. Marlin had been told as a young fish that life wasn't fair, and he had become the posterfish of that very cliche. He had once seen Tom watch Shawshank Redemption and remembered Red's timeless line, "you either get busy livin, or get busy dying." Marlin chose the latter.

His final days were marked by erratic behavior. Suicide attempts became the norm, but unfortunately for Marlin, evaporation had lowered the water level just far enough to rule a dolphin jump from the tank out of the equation. So he waited. And he starved.

Ironically enough, Tom had placed six flakes of food in the tank, one for each original fish, seconds before Marlin's death. His survival was inches in front of his face, and in one last symbolic moment of defiance, he closed his eyes, stilled his flipper, and joined his family.

The bubbles have stopped.

A Wee Introduction...

I am a Thomas, and I love to write. I have been writing creative stories for fun since I was a kid (autobiographies, stocking stuffers, querky status updates for my parents long before Twitter came along, etc). My favorite thing about this passion is that, for the most part, I truly do it for myself. I literally write just to make myself laugh, and it's just an added bonus if someone else laughs too.

I have extremely varied interests, so I suspect my blogs will mirror the random, yet somewhat organized chaos that is my life. I might post about a camping trip, actually catching a fucking fish, trying to piece together the events of the night before, my incurable road rage, or a pizza joint that reminds me of my summers in New York. They will all be ridiculous, but they will all be true.

I am writing these stories/grievances/observations so I don't forget them. Welcome to my life. These are tales from a Thomas.