By now I’m halfway through a heaven coke in a bottle my second of the day tasting like boulder hood youth and sweet capitalism— Marx never had coke in a thick glass bottle or he would’ve never lifted his pen...the way it rips down the throat and leaves the syrup sweet afterglow and the tremendous gut belch release, right there with sneeze and orgasm for best of releases, with giant evacuative crapping coming close...
Taking in the little Mennonite table set my mom bought with African brown and black cloth and crazy animal spirit monsters just below a wall where she had hung similar 3-d artifacts from her travels as a diver plus some leftover acquisitions from her father’s early oil exploration days, and then cloth napkins of similar ferocity and multi-bright colors and forks and knives and the cacophony of just-home fathers and children screams, dinner time across our little end of San Pedro town, and the roar of a tractor carrying a trailer full of Coke and Fanta Orange, Red, and Purple or giant water jugs that cost 5 belize with the trade in of an empty...and loud music blared from the house on stilts across the road and down a bit where some young single dark hombre blasted his stereo to ripping decibels and the worst kind of bangy calypso music with horns and bad refrains and drunken dark harmonies...but you just put up with it as part of the landscape, like wind, who had the right to say that none of it belonged?
There is a silence in all of it and when you start to realize this, you begin to enjoy the madness, you quiet down inside yrself , meaning less noise to be offended by, you empty your till and then there’s room for everything as long as you remember to make daily deposits to the void of your own inner clangings... to remember what needs to be remembered is the secret of those noises...find what it is that never sleeps and never wakes...you just leave your mind alone...you want nothing from your body or your mind...daring to live according to your lights and daring to live with the circus sounds of everyday poverty and satire and turning the tv on which we sometimes did when looking at each other or small-talk taking too long and being bored as bored is being unable to cope with minutes and there was just understanding that it was ok to do a little idiot-box escape, and we usually did this while eating...
My mother and I both ate fast. We ate fast in my family. We always ate like border monkeys, shoveling food, gulping drink, never finishing proper a mouthful but always heaped up the next forkful or spoonful, mixing, violating, escaping, hurrying, looking down, giving “the fig” to any collective family visions we might share...It was somehow related to survival, to get through the painful coming together of ritual nuclear pathos sharing...Why these habits of impatience and fear are so hard to break...they breed, they don’t want your best, your highest happiness, your greatest freedom...they are the hot snapping pinchers of Desire on that great crustacean fear that invisibly swims your mindthoughts and tepid fantasies drifting from scene to scene, pic to pic, plate to plate...many groans, many sighs, many moans...and nowhere is this more visible than at the dining table, especially Americans, especially neurotic phantom middle u.s. eaters like us, just frontloading to get through having to look at each other, fried chicken, dull vegetables, bad strokes of meat, bulging dis-ensouled chemical food, processed robot feed...and all of it is killing the genuine spirit of this country, eating is destroying the country along with the telly the web, and spells of fabricated fabrications...when I chose to be born here, in all the manifestations of works, in the varieties of spans of life, spheres of possibility, it must be that I and multitudes of others would become addicted to sex and seduction and chasing—bring conquests, praise, and humiliation, din and final humid and bad-sleeping humiliation until finally I wanted nothing more than the best, the highest happiness, the greatest freedom...desirelessness is the highest bliss...
And one of the first ways to figure this way around yourself is to understand the intake and elimination of foodstuff, realize what foods fuel lust and greed, which meats bring what emotions, how to reduce for the sake of pure joy and love...I am guileless and sincere in this to start in the next seven years of my life however in Belize I was still a little boy...
-Michael Price
