How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word

If my study in Modernist and Postmodernist poetics had to be broken down to something singularly broad enough to cover most aspects of my research, I would say that I have spent the better part of the last few years considering the use of words. Although I have committed to this study primarily from the perspective of poetic uses of words, much of this thinking inevitably transgressed into how I perceived and understood the world beyond the artificialities of poetry.

Words, as I saw them, were largely meaningless, malleable and plastic things, only given significance by the circumstances of their use in various, always changing cultural, societal and formal contexts. The word, then, carries no weight but what the subjective individual decides to ascribe to it. It waits patiently as an essentially empty thing to be imbued with some meaning ultimately rendered utterly nebulous in its dependency on the constantly shifting both internal and external situations in which it is used.

I became arrogant enough to believe that words are merely sounds that give shape to the things that inundate our consciousness day-to-day. A ‘tree’ is a ‘tree,’ only because we know that thing to be a ‘tree.’ That feeling of ‘guilt’ is only known as ‘guilt’ because we have assigned to it the signifier ‘guilt.’ Even then, what is a ‘tree’ or ‘guilt’ to me, is something marginally, maybe completely, different to someone else depending on their personal history and association with these words and the sensations they provoke. Because of this inconstancy, I assumed they meant nothing.

They provide us the means to communicate, but in their communicative use—the constant back-and-forth of dialogical exchange—persistently shed their intended meaning. What was meant in their initial delivery becomes partially, or totally, tarnished in being received and processed. We are capable of understanding one another, but never as we completely intend.

Progressively, I emptied them of their importance so that they were little more than freely flowing vessels stripped of their ostensible need to carry anything definite. They were just letters and noises that performed a machine-like role that gave some sense to the world, but captured none of its subjective emotionality. They were an embodiment of societal functionality and little else.

I believed more in the sensual aspects of my world that I thought actually carried some 'real' weight. A sensual aspect that, in its internal solidity and co-dependent companionship with the self-consciousness, couldn’t be shared by words, the impoverished nature of which would ensure the sensation would be lost in transmission.

However, I have come to realize that this is an idealised perception of words that abstracts them from the very reality we all dwell within—that I had, in turn, tried to abstract them from—where they do carry an enormous amount of significance beyond their plastic design. Indeed, their very plasticity is the essential component of their weight: the flexible aspect that makes them so easy to obsess over and capture our perpetual mental motion as we try to make sense of things.

It dawned on me that what can be said in a great many circumstances, one person to another, is not empty and meaningless, but transformatively rich, rising above the superficiality of the noises we make that deliver words. These words lodge themselves into memory and emotion and will not become unstuck: words both communicate and become the sensual and emotional world; and no matter how you try to manipulate and remake them as empty signifiers, their sound and delivery have the capacity to consume you because they are you.

They are not temporary and empty shapes of letters and sounds we make. What is uttered cannot be passed off as belonging only to a moment’s superficiality. They transcend their communicative use.  What is said, one person to another, becomes awfully difficult at times to be passed off as meaningless—as words being words—when what is said is the very memory in which we circulate and have to process ourselves.

Be careful with how you use them. They’ll often be all you have left.

Some True Facts About New Years Eve

1.    New Years Eve is loosely based on the 2011 film of the same name starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

2.     Pagans believe that the consumption of seafood and fossilised pterodactyl eggs on New Years Eve allows them to see the New Years Eve fairy.

3.     Sarah Jessica Parker is the New Years Eve fairy.

4.     New Years Eve was popularized in the 1980s to facilitate the production of twice as many Die Hard movies.

5.     Once called ‘Yeah Nah Eve,’ New Years Eve went through a period where it commemorated the first televised interview of a footballer.

6.     Ninjas take New Years Eve off. Generally there is too much light for them to operate effectively.

7.     New Years Eve fireworks are mostly holograms transmitted from a convenient location in Columbia.

8.      ‘Auld Lang Syne’ literally translates into ‘Difficult Birthing of the Year.’ Hard rocking Christians, Creed, wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in tribute of Live’s ‘Lightning Crashes’ (another song about difficult birthing).

9.     The animal symbol of New Years Eve is the drunken ox. In some countries, people still bring in the New Year by screaming, ‘tally ho you devilish oxen!’ while dragging around wagons full of booze or tea.

10.  In the 1800s people celebrated New Years Eve by gathering around pianos in large groups and singing classic folk songs, like ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ‘Teardrop,’ and ‘Lightning Crashes.’ The wearing of silly hats was not only encouraged but also enforced by law. The chicken hat was very popular, which is why some older folk still refer to New Years Eve as 'The Night of the Perched Poultry.'

11.  The traditional beverage of New Years Eve is not champagne like is commonly thought, but is actually Pepsi cola mixed with cognac sipped from a soup ladle.

12.  In the Pacific, dwelling on an island, is a tribal community that insists on the impossibility of New Years Eve and marks the organization of such a calendar event as an abomination; indeed, they mock the very idea of calendar, insisting instead on the heterogeneous continuity of time as an elongated moment we step within in life, then step beyond in death. Bombing and gifts have proven ineffective in communicating the logic of a year.

13.  New Years Eve was the setting of the gritty Chris Nolan Pokémon movie, ‘Mew Years Eve.’

14.  Robert Downey Jnr brings in the New Year by getting in his Iron Man costume/jump suit, drinking Pepsi & cognac, shouting ‘pow!’ and listening to Linkin Park. Katherine ‘Hammerhead’ Heigl is usually present.

15.  It is almost always disappointing as an event. And I expect this New Years Eve will probably be no different to any other New Years Eve.

The Great Question of Where and How to Sit

I’ve learnt a great many things working in hospitality:

·      For many people the menu is a confusing, upsetting and at times life-or-death document that must be perused at great length and with much brow furrowing.

·      Although people will agonize over the menu, they will likely have forgotten what they ordered when their food is brought to the table.

·      Water is a delicacy and must be consumed in great quantities lest dehydration kicks in while dining. Waving the bottle in the air when it is empty is the universal sign for ‘more water’: the waiter must rapidly resolve this gesture.

·      If in doubt, order some sort of salad with grilled chicken or a burger. Lightly fried calamari is also a perfectly safe option.

·      Eye contact with your waiter and saying ‘thanks’ or ‘thank you’ are both entirely optional.

·      The appropriate response to ‘hello, how are you?’ is ‘two’—as in a truncated ‘we need a table for two.’

·      Allergies are the new thing.

·      Everyone’s coffee order must be different.

·      For some, being asked if they would like something (like a drink or food, as per a restaurant’s usual calling) is actually an intrusion by the waiter. Fixing the waiter with a confused stare and silence is the usual means of addressing their apparent rudeness or daring to interupt.

·      When a table is asked, ‘are you guys ready to order?’ and someone says ‘yes,’ they’re usually lying. No one is ever really ready to order. Its probably an existential thing.

·      A lot of people are sooking and stupid dickbags. This needs no further embellishment; I think it is pretty self-explanatory; it just goes with the business really.

However, when I was working the other night, what really struck me (again) is how complicated people make the simple art of sitting down. I say ‘art’ because the act itself becomes this strange performance or dance that is its own mini-narrative revolving around the two ostensibly simple questions: ‘where to sit and how far out should my chair be from the table?’ This most basic of physical tasks—to place your bum on a seat—has proven time and again to be a colossal challenge for many people visiting my restaurant that also reveals a great deal about their personality or even sense of entitlement.

The first challenge of the waiter is taking a group over to a table and having to stand there while they sort out the arrangement of who is sitting where. Who is getting the comfortable booth? Who is sitting closest to the next table over? How can we orientate ourselves around the table so we achieve the best balance of feng shui? How can we ensure that our internal energies are flowing freely between one another? If I sit here will I still be the same temperature the whole time? Will I be able to hear you if I sit diagonally across from you? Am I vulnerable to velociraptor attacks if I sit here? Will geopolitics be unsettled if I sit here? Will my geography be happy? (that last one is abstract, but so are most of the people I have to deal with)

After these various issues have been accounted for and the table has sat down, usually with at least two or three shuffles to maintain the right equilibrium, the next issue that faces the sitter is how far out they should sit from the table. Fortunately, in this case, most are happy to be closer to their food and don’t clog the vital lanes I have to navigate as a waiter (of course, some people are just fat and can't help where they sit in relation to their distance from the table). Yet, there are also some who seem to believe that they are entitled to all the space around them and are quite happy to lean back in their chairs and make it really difficult for anyone, customers and waiters, to get around them. 

These people seem to believe in their table as real estate, they want what they perceive to be the best and biggest, the chair is just a further extension to prove their apparent worth. Appropriately they tend to sprawl (as in urban sprawl and taking up physical space sprawling ... get it?) It is an enlightening view into their toxic personality. They need to be worked around. Why should they be of any assistance? They’ve assumed the right to their space now; it is no longer the restaurants while they are there. They cower over their table and chair like Gollum and the one ring: their precious.

Basically, if this wasn’t already clear, I’m impatient with people’s strange idiocies when it comes to something as simple as dining out. But it isn’t a particularly difficult thing to do. I don’t really think that one should need a manual, it’s really pretty instinctive: you sit, you order, you eat, you drink, you enjoy. If sitting is such a cause of anxiety, I firstly don’t think you should sit anymore, and secondly particularly don’t think you should subject yourself to the stresses of sitting in a restaurant where the choices may overwhelm you.

As for the jerks that stake their claims like some sort of middle class overweight gold prospector, well, I am a big guy and room is already hard to come by when I take up so much of it, so allow me my whine. Dicks.

Eating Turkey at Christmas

Eating turkey at Christmas is exhausting (note that when shaved and eaten in a sandwich any old day, it is less exhausting). It could be the red wine and beer, or the Bloody Mary. But I believe it is mostly the consumption of turkey (and a little bit of ham, pork and potato salad, but mostly turkey).

I am not entirely sure whether it is the physical act of eating turkey that is so tiring or the flesh of the turkey itself. One moment I am enjoying, the next I am curled up on the couch drooling slightly with my eyes crossing and my lids drooping down pathetically. My face grows slack, almost floppy, while my neck rolls my head around circularly. One hand is resting protectively on my stomach, the other sort of holds a wine. The wine is moments away from its demise. One leg is generally strewn over the edge, dangling just above the floor.

I don’t usually nap. It is just something, a fad even, that I have never embraced. But when I eat turkey I don’t only nap, I pass out like a drunken baby having their afternoon lie down after a period on the White Russians.

Turkey knocks me out.

Indeed, it’s amazing I can actually type this. And to be honest, I have been writing it between bouts of uncontrollable and slightly disconcerting snoring, punctuated by sleep-shouting: ‘just one more leg.’ I feel it gripping my insides now, racing along my adrenal glands to force me into another few coma-ridden moments. I can almost hear it making that turkey gobble noise.

Christmas is exhausting enough, but you add turkey into the mix and it suddenly becomes a day built primarily around arriving at siesta. Maybe this is somehow representative or reflective of Jesus? Is that why we devour turkey at Christmas? To faster arrive at some infant-like sleep symbolic of Jesus in his manger?

Or is that it is really delicious and conducive to large gatherings of people? Do we eat it then for the sake of tasty convenience? Is it representative of nothing except its ease of serving in a bustling modern world?

(And by ‘we’ I mean middle class white folk … so this may be sort of limited in its assumption of universal turkey eating during Christmas.)

I’m not really sure. I just think eating turkey is exhausting. This I am sure of. Now, to sleep.