Tag: franz kafka

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 178

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Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

My roommate was skinning chicken on the kitchen counter. She had a long sharp knife, a pair of rubber gloves, and a trashbag for the bones. Little pink lumps like a bunch of beetles turned inside-out. They crawled around the counter and registered for a one-night residency teaching anatomy classes in my head.

I’d been thinking about cooking something tonight, but instead I went with cereal.

My thumb’s mostly healed from where I’d cut it chopping onions two weeks ago. The skin’s a little lower like a crater and it’s very red and smooth. I imagine I’ll have a scar for a while. Call me twisted, but there’s something seductive to me about having small scars. Knicks and marks that only you and people closest to you will ever notice – notching on the wall of a body prison.

I talked to a man today who’s moving to Wilmington. It’s got good business for him and he wanted to be closer to the ocean. Eventually, that plastic bag full of chicken bones might find itself in the same Atlantic waters. It’ll travel on the back of a garbage truck, settle in a landfill, let in enough light and moisture for the bones to decompose (but only partially), then, during a bad thunderstorm or errant hurricane, it will wash off the heaps of trash and run from creek to creek to the nearest river, tumbling in the waves, occasionally getting caught on overturned trees or submerged boulders, but finally – inevitably – it’ll get swept out to sea. One morning, years from now, the man who moved to Wilmington might find it, but will he recognize it for what it was? Or will all that time in the ocean have stripped it so clean that it’s barely a trashbag, much less a bag of chicken bones?

There’s no telling what comes back to you. And often, we don’t even recognize it when it does.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border  – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN\

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

Coffee Log, Day 343

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Hi.

Coffee: Locomotive Blend, PennyCup Coffee

Today I put a little bit of tapenade in my reheated pasta. It spiced it up a bit. It was nice.

I don’t have much to say. It was a long, busy day. The kind of day where you do so much you don’t feel like you’ve done anything. And now that it’s almost over there’s that panic like you’re going to lose something you can’t get back. I end a lot of days like that: lying in bed thinking about what I must have done wrong.

There’s two edges to pressure: you need it if you’re going to become anything; but it eats away at you every step.

I talked to a couple guys who didn’t believe in government for religious reasons. I thought that was a little ominous, but then one of them told me a story about how he saved a cockroach from getting squished by his wife. He took it outside. That made me feel a little better, or maybe just confused.

Novel Count: 20,733

Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis


Coffee Log, Day 88

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Hi.

Coffee: Organic Honduran, Trader Joe’s brand

I did some research: traditional beer brewing often uses fish bladders in the filtering process. I quickly scanned my favorites to see if they participate in the practice and thankfully the best of the bunch – Guinness, Negra Modelo, etc – were all clear. For those interested, here’s a handy website to see if you’re drinking animals to get drunk: barnivore.com.

We all have our castles. They’re not physical, rather mental, rather dreamed up delusions that the world was always perfect, always an act of divinity (labeled science, god, what have you), came out of the primordial soup with straight plastic lines and nutritional labels. Go back a few hundred years and people knew a lot less but what they did know was immediate and vital. I couldn’t sew a patch in my jeans if you asked me; a few centuries back, my family made their clothes from scratch.

That lack of transparency means we’re all drinking fish bladders without realizing it. We take for granted that every act we participate in is bloodless, safe, pure. When we shop or sit down at the cafe we’re above the muck and grime, blind to prejudice, removed from human (and animal) suffering. But the trick is that we’re doing all the same things we’ve been doing since DNA struggled to produce claws and fangs, only we’ve automated the process so well as to give ourselves the illusion of having no agency over it.

I’m trying to be better. I’ll buy vegan beer. I’ll look at the corporate missives when I buy clothes, try to avoid the sweat shops. I gave up shrimp a long time ago because so much of the stuff was drawn from dark waters on slave ships in Southeast Asia. But try as I might, I’m going to stumble into horror and atrocity with big, ignorant smiles time and time again.

It’s hard to be good and modern at the same time.

Currently Reading:
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson

“Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.” – Franz Kafka

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