Touch and Remember

(This is fiction and was written in 2005, I'm posting it here for Al, Sam, and Ky)

I spent most of my morning drifting into various states of wakefulness. Doing this required that I deny the existence of the alarm clock. The clock was obviously angry at my attempt, so it just screamed louder. My hand flew out of the sheets with great force in the direction of the snooze button. It was after my hand collided painfully with the desk that I recalled moving the clock to the far side of the room; so that I couldn't get to the snooze button. That made it look like I had to get out of bed and acknowledge the fact that Mr. Clock was indeed a real threat to my sleep. I lowered my sheets and stared at the clock face, and what I saw woke me up better then the alarm ever had before. "Five Hours."

Maybe I am still tired, I just have to re-focus . . . "Five Hours" is a rather interesting thing for a clock to say, especially since it usually only showed three or four bright-blue-digital-retina-burning numerals. Perhaps the clock was still angry at me for trying to cease its existence.

Rolling out of bed, I stumbled through the blurry room on a mission to silence the clock. My feet skillfully avoided the out-of-focus mess of underwear and electronics on my floor. I reached my objective and sent my finger to the bright blue blur that represented the snooze button, hopefully to quiet the cacophony pouring from the annoying box. My finger contacted the button, the assault on my ears stopped, and a jolt of electricity went up my arm.

I felt the shock hit my brain, and for some reason I was thinking of where the alarm clock was made. I could see the nine-year-old Chinese girl assembling it, quickly, not really understanding what the parts were. She was humming a tune I've never heard before, her small fingers skillfully assembling the random bits of plastic. I could see the alarm being packaged, and I witnessed myself taking it out of the box and immediately throwing away the little white instruction booklet.

I took my finger away from the clock and just stood for a little bit. Today had officially hit "Orange" on my Strange Morning Alert scale, and I was out of duct tape. I decided to look at the clock again. "Five Hours" the display announced. Fantastic.

I picked up the clock and sat down cross-legged, the same electric feeling coursing through my arm. I put the clock down and the feeling subsided. "Ok, maybe it's an electrical problem" I announced to the room "Let's just unplug it." I sat forward and pulled the plug, then picked up the clock again.

The electric feeling was there, all the same, and when it hit my brain this time, I could see the clock's plastic case being cast and cut. I watched the whole manufacturing process create the little noise box that was now in my hands. Very interesting. The electric feel stopped and I snapped out of my little trance. I decided it was time to stop playing with my alarm clock and get to work.

I walked over to my dresser, and as soon as I opened the drawer I knew (intimately) the tree it once was, because it shared its memory with me. Everything from where it had been to how it was made and all the details about all the clothes that were ever stored within came into my mind. It made me a little glad that I was the first person to own this dresser. Dressing quickly, I didn't pay much attention to the clothes telling me their life stories. Cotton never did have an interesting social life, I figured had enough to worry about on my own; for example, I had no idea what time it was. Since the sun was out I decided I might as well get to work and figure it out when I get there.

Donning my shoes (moo) I walked briskly to my car, a stately 1981 Dodge Omni. I didn't have to worry about touching the drivers side door, it never worked, and in the interest of balance, it lacked a passenger's side door. I walked in front of the car and lifted the hood, realizing the amazing amount of information the car remembered from its days at the factory. I could even see the machines spraying the paint on the steel hood. I checked to make sure the pantyhose that replaced the broken alternator belt were still holding and poured in the quart of oil the car required to take me to work. I closed the hood, slid into the car and went through the ritual of starting it.

Over the course of the whole drive to work, I learned about how the Dodge Omni was made, from mining the sheet metal out to being shipped and stored in a dealer lot. I parked behind the Home Depot, and sneaked in through the back of the gardening section.

"Kelly! You're early! Amazing!" Mike, my over-zealous manager announced from behind a particularly flamboyant fern.
"Mike, you know I'm always on time, I'm just cleaning up a little out back before I come in."
"Right. Look miss, just because you came in early doesn't mean that you're on the clock"

Nodding, I retreated to the break room, and saw by the clock that it was 10:15 in the morning, a full hour before I actually needed to be here. I could have showered! I'm going to have to grab a new clock, and what in the world am I going to do with a free hour? The room could use a cleaning, but I'm not about to touch anything in here, especially considering it will probably tell me where its been, and that is the last thing I ever want to know about most of this stuff. Mental note, don't sit down, don't use the restroom, and stay well away from that coffee machine. OK, enough thinking about what I can't touch, let's try to see what I can touch.

Prowling around the break room for an innocent object, my eyes fell on a Bic pen resting in a mug. I leaned out and poked it, feeling the little electric tingle traveling up my arm. This pen was Mike's, he used it to sign off on our timesheets, and he wrote short, squat letters with vastly oversized "W"s and "V"s. I could feel how Mike moved the pen, sometimes putting it absentmindedly behind his ear while he thought. I had the idea to pull an old receipt out of my pocket and write his signature on it. It came out flawlessly.

The hour went by quickly, I had been poking and prodding different objects and they willingly informed me how truly boring most things in this world were, though some of the objects had mildly interesting secret lives. A discarded paperclip taught me how to pick a file cabinet lock, and a forgotten pair of sunglasses thought me how to play, and cheat at poker.

After the hour had passed, I found myself at work, behind the register. Every single piece of money I handled had a very long history; it burned my brain to move through it so quickly. Sometimes I would slow down just to comprehend better what the bills were telling me (much to the displeasure of the customers), but some of this stuff was interesting to me. I was learning how to barter, haggle, and swindle. Some bills were the gift of a poor man to the collection plate, some to the contractor to make an addition to the home, some to the thong strings of a stripper who now wanted a new set of gardening gloves.

My day went on like this for a bit more then three hours until I saw men carrying rifles run through the store. They were wearing black, faces covered, and they carried bags (presumably money from the bank next door). There was panic, I guess with good reason. I just stood there, as my day was already too crazy to be real; I wasn't that worried anyway. Lots of people were screaming, reminding me of my alarm clock. I wanted to go back home and curl up in bed. A policewoman was telling people to hide; she had her pistol in her hand. She noticed me just standing there, and for some reason she came running for me, telling me to get on the ground.

Apparently one of the attackers found her to be a threat, and shot her before she could get to me. The sound of the shot made me think my head would have exploded, I fell to the ground with my ears ringing. I was scared, I had never seen anyone dead, let alone shot. I felt so helpless. Just before I completely lost it, I saw her gun. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to take it. I leaned forward and grabbed it, learning what the "Pistol Master" badge on her uniform really meant.

I was sure of my target, I lined up the sights, exhaled, squeezing the trigger. It was old news to me; the gun told me what twenty years of it was like. The cop-killer fell, I shut my eyes.

The last thing I heard was shattering glass. Five hours ago I was waking up to an annoying alarm clock, just another poor girl working her way through college, now I'm a skilled shooter in the middle of a firefight and I just killed a man. I guess at least I don't have to buy a new alarm clock. A bullet nicked the pen behind my ear and entered my skull. It was made in Akron, Ohio.

Mustang Magic

It's probably around the year 2001. I had taken my 1966 Mustang completely apart and put it back together and needed some extra parts to finish it up. Parts from a 1966 car aren't easy to come by, the Internet wanted lots of money, and shipping larger parts is no fun. I even went to NAPA to try to buy some parts. The clerk at NAPA flatly told me that "My car was old" and that I "needed to buy a new one." Good thing they told me or I never would have known.

I asked around and eventually found a place called "Mustang Magic" that apparently had been operating since the sixties. I had some trouble finding it, I had to drive through a bad neighborhood and fight through a congested autopark. I could tell it was the store by the sight of two long rows of classic mustangs, some of them in good condition, some not. There were four garage bays, two for mechanical work, and the rest for auto body.

The door to the old building creaked open, it smelled like motor oil and old paper. There was little light, and little room, as standing room was limited by a long desk directly in front of the store. The walls were plastered with faded vintage automotive posters. A snake in a wire cage contentedly worked on digesting a small mouse. An older fellow was sitting behind the counter, and I just started talking to him about cars.

For hours.

His name was Lew, he was a real character, always joking, cynical and more energetic then you'd expect. Whenever you needed a part he'd wind his way through piles of junk and pull out just what you needed. I hung out at the shop as soon as I got off work, and learned to work on some very nice cars. Vintage mustangs were special in their own right, but that all changes when you're turning a wrench on a Shelby 500KR.

One of my favorites was when we got one fantastic looking restored Mustang up on the lift, and the drivers side floor pan had been fixed by welding a stop sign in under the car.

Time passed, eventually the exotic European repair shop across from Mustang Magic started to build an addition. As the cinder block walls were going up, Lew commented on how the workers had no clue what they were doing. A day later one of the walls fell.

(Click for a larger image)

All those classic cars, crushed in a rain of cinder. Lew was understandably devastated, but he was still energetic and knew he'd make it out of this. The winter was harsh, the snake died in the cold.

Some time passed, I lost my Mustang as well, but I still visited Lew. He had grown more cynical, and didn't smile anymore.

The insurance company classified it as an "Act of God" and refused to pay him a cent. Not all of the cars belonged to Lew, and the owners were suing him for the price of their crushed cars. Business had dried up, and the city told him to move his junk heaps.

One day I came to visit, and the shop was gone. Lew, the cars, the tools, everything. No one knew where. I never saw him again.

Welcome to Tofuball's Reading

I created this blog so I could keep the stories I wrote separate from my worklog, as the two topics are quite different. I intend to post both truth and fiction that I write here, but I don't know how much fiction I have left in me :) Enjoy!

My Own Story, Part 3: One Nagging Question

This is part three, click here for part two.

Because I come from a broken household, I never thought I had a really good idea of the role a man played in the family. I was always looking at other families to see what to mimic . . . or what not to. I was always thinking and reading about how to be a really good husband or father, and what to look for in a wife. Any time I was over at a friend's house, I was judging their parents.

Every single evening that I was at Jon's, he and his family invited me in for dinner. I was there for a very long time because of the work on the RX-7 (seriously, months), so I got a very good snapshot of his family life. Though it was rather interesting, and near the end, scary, that he was never angry at me for taking up his garage for so long; when I asked him about it he just shrugged.

I met his kids, four of them (I don't know about you, but that's a lot of kids), and they struck me as odd, I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I graduated high school in 2000, and still worked for the school system, and I didn't usually meet kids as well behaved and bright as this. I'm more used to them being cynical, or more often, stupid.

I also met his wife, the first stay-at-home mom I can ever remember meeting. She also home schooled the kids. At one point during conversation she mentioned how she was always looking for ways to better submit to her husband's leadership. I really didn't know how to take that other then thinking she was very strange.

I first learned they were religious when someone told me, and then when they invited me in for dinner the first time I saw them pray over dinner, so I stopped cursing when I was around them. He never once preached at me. We usually talked about mechanical or construction related things, and in turn I told his kids stories about giant hamster powered cars. I learned that he had built his house himself, with his father.

Jon was a good mechanic, a father to his kids, a loving husband, an Oracle programmer and a home builder. Great traits I'd want to mimic, except there was one nagging question . . .

How could someone as smart as him be Christian?

"How can you possibly believe the Bible" I said to him "Man pollutes everything he touches, there is no way this book is authentic after thousands of years."

I was expecting lines, excuses, maybe even the old "you shouldn't question God," But Jon didn't say any of that.



"Have you read it?"
"No"
"Read it." He said.


I didn't really have an answer to that.

My Own Story, Part 2: Jon and the Blue Vert

This is part two, click here for part one

I was a network field technician. Basically, my job was to drive across the county to one of our 215 sites, find the problem, flip a switch, and get back on the road. I needed a car to do my work, and having the mustang turned into a Candy Apple Red accordion was not helping things.

A friend of mine (Trevor) mentioned that there was an RX-7 Convertible sitting in the front of a dealer lot. He took me to the dealer, and the first thing I did when the salesperson came out was look at an older used Lexus. Talked about needing space and a back seat. She showed me a few other cars and we talked about practicality. After a while I mentioned that it would be fun to own that RX-7, but I really should be more responsible.

We went over to look at it and I saw it was covered in dust. I always thought those cars were interesting, especially since I had just read an article about rotary engines at How Stuff Works. I told the dealer I'd think about my options and I went back to work. I asked my boss if he knew anything that would help because he can be knowledgeable about cars. He said that he didn't know anything about those crazy rotary engine powered cars, but he knew someone who did, and he introduced me to a fellow named Jon, an ex-mechanic, lanky with glasses and a mustache, and apparently eager to come look at this car with me.

He takes his lunch break and we hop into his red RX-7 Turbo II and head over to the dealer. He tells me the deal with the car, that it needs a clutch, and that I'm free to use his garage . . . that's equipped with a lift and almost all the tools I could ever need. That is a very generous offer, considering the tools are probably worth $100K.

The dealer wanted $8995, I talked him down to $5000 after tax tags title. I drove it till the clutch went, and took Jon up on his offer. I put the car up on the lift and, for different reasons, it remained there for months. (The parts took too long to come in, stuff broke, things came up, and I made the mistake of (trying to) rebuild the differential at the same time. This was all before I knew about the RX-7 Club.)

Click here for part three.

My Own Story, Part 1: The End of the Mustang

I think it was some time in the spring of 2001, give or take a year. I was dating a super cute Russian girl who was sitting next to me in my candy apple red 1966 Mustang. This is the first car I ever bought with my own money, and I had restored it from the tires up, in fact, I had just got it out of the shop for brake work that I was too lazy to do myself. The weather was great, the windows were down, and we were cruising along I270. Life was really pretty good. Well, except that my date was yelling at me for some reason, but that was the norm.

Now, enters the catalyst, a Pontiac Sunfire, cutting off a semi-truck from a merge lane. A Lexus cut in front of me to dodge, I hit the brakes harder, and the car pitched right. The brakes were adjusted wrong. I cursed. Time stopped.

I had all the time in the world to think. I was calm. I did not fear death, but for some reason I was sad. I was faced with a choice, plow my American steel into this Lexus and maybe kill everyone in both cars, or stay on the brakes and pitch the car into the cement barrier along the side of the road and kill only myself and this screaming girl. I chose the cement barrier. Don't ask why.

"Why was this so depressing?" I thought, "This is it? Life?" The car was pitched sideways now, I might be able to get it all the way around if I try hard enough, if I can get the rear drivers side wheel to hold . . . Screw it, it's too late, lets go. Time started back up. The car slammed into the wall and that huge front hood became a whole lot shorter. The back end swung around and obliterated itself on the back end of a semi truck, network cables and tools flew across the highway in a spread. The gas tank took off, skittering down the highway like a giant mutant hockey puck.

The dust settled, I was fine, she was screaming. The ambulance came, and I watched from the back window as the mangled wreck faded into the distance.


(Click here for part 2)

A short Tofuball story from the DR

I may get a lot of the details wrong, as it's been a while since, and I'm going to simplify this post, so that it will be in very simple and quick terms (and leaving out a lot of detail), and also I will provide some background you may need to understand this otherwise short story.

In some areas of the Dominican Republic, I observed that the relationship between different races are a great deal different then they are here. In the capital, Santa Domingo, things are a bit different then in the poorer places (like where I spent most of my time) in Polo. Out there (usually, not always) if you're Hispanic they regard you as a Dominican, if you're white they think you're a tourist, and if you're black they think that you are a Haitian.

For those of you who aren't too keen on geography, the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Dominicans speak Spanish, Haitians speak Creole. Haiti is in very bad shape compared to the Dominican Republic, so a lot of Haitians run the border to find work in the DR, much like Mexicans run the border to find work in the US. However, once the Haitians get in to the DR, they are treated as sub-human. For example: in a flood a while back, hundreds of Haitians died, as well as a few Dominicans, and the local newspapers only reported the Dominican deaths. They usually won't deport the Haitians because businesses love the ultra-cheap labor. (Sound familiar?)

Basically, this gives a lot of the Haitians with a racial inferiority complex, not all too dissimilar from the racial inferiority complex some blacks in the US would have had during the times of slavery and segregation.

I met a fascinating, intelligent and cheerful person from one of the Haitian camps who told me that he had broken free of his previous perception of racial inferiority, and I was curious so I asked for his story . . .



One day when he was working in the hills, he was in a terrible accident (I forgot exactly what he told me happened). His friends flagged down a car to take him to the hospital, and it was a missionary pastor from South Carolina, USA. The pastor took the man to the local hospital (very far away) and by the time they reached it the worker had already lost an incredible amount of blood.

Now, keep in mind, Dominican hospitals are not like the ones in the United States. The doctors are not quite as well trained and the equipment is not exactly as . . . sterile or up-to-date.

The hospital managed to stop the bleeding, but they did not have an untainted source of the right kind of blood to give to the man, and without it, he did not have long to live. The pastor offered to give his own blood, and it was the correct type. Because of this act, the man recovered. The Haitian man was amazed to hear that a white man was willing to give his own blood to him, as the Haitian man perceived that he was sub-human, and believed that the blood was not even compatible.

This one act was of amazing significance, a gift that gave more than life, in a world different from what most people reading this post have ever experienced.