— tapioca world tour

Fall is coming. I could smell it in the air tonight on the 2a bike ride back from Ry’s house. Having slept through dinner, I hadn’t consumed anything save his orange Gatorade. The hunger merely heightened my sense of smell, and tonight, Somerville smelled like wet trees and ripped trash.

In the spirit of Elvis Movie Marathon Sundays, but having run out of Elvis movies and it being Monday, we watched Igby Goes Down, a movie I couldn’t possibly recommend LESS, as its only purpose is to justify apathetic trust-fund hipsters and their hopeless existence. Even though it’s got Clare Danes and Bill Pullman. Like the fool that I am, I picked Igby instead of Koreeda’s “After Life” because After Life is in Japanese and we can’t read subtitles very clearly on Ry’s computer. Anyway, bad decision. The moral of the story is, when given a choice between a Hollywood downer and a Koreeda Hirokazu film, always choose the latter.

So it smelled like fall and it felt like it too — there was a chilly breeze, the seat of my bike was all covered in dew when I got outside, and the streets were totally empty. As I headed down Holland, I looked up the road towards Arlington and had a flashback of bike ride memories to G.’s house after midnight. You know, remnants of those nights when you can feel the summer slipping away from you. It was a sad time, last year. I’m glad all is better now. I feel like either 10 years or 10 minutes have passed since last August, but I can’t tell you which. Time is so meaningless, really. We take with us what we want, and we leave the rest.

At the airport, there hung a poster in Terminal C of Manchester, UK: pictured was the main hall of my university — the one I dropped out of — with a UK flag swaying in the overcast skies above the city. “That’s where I used to live,” I told N.

It had been a sign, though of what, I’m still not sure. Perhaps we need to be reminded of all the places we have been, lest we forget what parts of ourselves we’ve left there. And so I flew to Philadelphia to remember all the parts of myself I left there when I was a kid, only to rediscover my bitchy teenage self in perpetual argument with my mother (the overly tan one in the photo). A charming time. Just reasserts that every moment of life is, by necessity, a moment of self-discovery — and I mean that in the least cheesy, new-agey way possible. We just really need to work on ourselves, all the time, else we’ll always be unhappy.

Mom took us (by force, my aunt and I) to the Jersey shore. She wanted to show us all the pieces of her adolescence, she wanted me to share the same memories and sentimentality for Ocean City. Instead, stuck in traffic for almost four hours, starving, and exhausted, I barely spoke. I people-watched on the boardwalk, past water ice stands and salt water taffy factories, walking clumsily through a humidity so intense you can only understand it when you’ve been in it, and fell asleep on the drive home listening to The Postal Service’s “Be Still My Heart” on repeat about a million times. It’s become my anthem for the weird weekend.

E.’s event was fun. Lots of chill people and guitars. After it cleared out, I practised handstands on the floor of Art & Soul like it was 1987 all over again. Maybe it is.

I love how children see things. Last night I let E. go nuts (unsupervised) with my phone camera. Here’s what he shot. (PS – the mouth is mine — as might be obvious from the missing teeth — and he made me pose strategically for several minutes before getting the shot he wanted.)

Word!

The weird karma of this weird week has begun to get to me.

I just swallowed a rubber band (latex, actually, so make connotations as you will), one of the crossbite-correcting apparati I’m supposed to wear in my mouth at all times. I knew it would happen one of these days; when you go to remove the band from the bottom molar, it does what all good rubber bands do and shoots up like a rocket onto the roof of your mouth — or, in some cases, down the back of your throat. I tried coughing but could tell it was too far down to come back up. Then I had this moment where I recalled grade school, preschool even, when they warn you against blowing up balloons because of the possibility of rubber bursting and going down your throat, causing immediate suffocation.

“Mark!” I yelled. “What happens if I swallow this rubber band? Will I die?”

“No,” he said. “You won’t die.”

I washed the band down with half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and went back to grumbling about how the new nosering I bought is too thick to get in my nose, but nonrefundable for obvious hygienic reasons. Ry and I ate at the Buddhist Cultural Center, though. That’s some good karma right there — or would be, if I believed in karma. Marinated tofu and spiced carrot soup improves every situation. That, and pints of Ben & Jerry’s.

I don’t know why I’m so incapable of getting work done today. I blame E.’s astrology — if I believed in astrology — the stars against me, instead of me against myself. What a great philosophy for the deflective.

It was supposed to thunderstorm today, but didn’t. August is so fickle like that. In an attempt to avoid getting soaked, I forfeited my usual bikeride to work in exchange for a hot and annoying subway ride. Now it’s beautiful outside and I’m inside eating Fossil Fuel, the new flavor from Ben & Jerry’s, which is not as good as Marsha Marsha Marshmellow but definitely worth the investment.

Philadelphia this weekend. Philly in August is like walking in three-bean chilli — mucky, hot on all sides, sufficating, delicious. I remember myriad Philly summers living with my grandparents. My grandmother would drive down to Strawbridge’s and I’d try in vain to unstick my thighs from the ribbed plastic uni-seat of her long green 1981 Plymouth, or whatever it was.

She would keep a plastic baggie hanging from the radio dial in which we’d stuff wrappers from the other plastic baggie of green sugar-coated gumdrops. I think she really liked the color green. Anyway, and the seatbelt would nearly scald my hand, and the second we opened the door, in would swoop this rush of hot exhaust-filled air. I’d stagger into the parking lot, mentally noting how it was nearly impossible to breathe, a situation that warranted buying a slushie from Wawa’s.

After a while, memory is all we have.

“Summer is so short,” 9-yr-old I. said to me today. “You know, it’s only 60 days or something. I just can’t believe it’s almost over.”

I can’t believe it is either, but I’m enjoying the warm wind and humid nights while they last. This weekend I got to see an old pal and go sailing on her dad’s boat. Got to see her little brother bond with E. over Travel Scrabble. Got to watch Boston disappear in the distance.

Still can’t get that Brazilian Girls’ song out of my head. Don’t Stop. Makes me wanna go clubbing in Spain or something:

When and how did I become my mother
Am I getting on your nerves?
Let’s just not talk about it
and fill the blanks with space
Go to the park later
Get some ice cream…