my NEW title is Cockney rhyming slang for “it’s all gone wrong”. But actually, it’s quite the the opposite, my friends. It’s all taken a right turn. It’s all sunshine and rosy goodness.
sanster 2007
Pretentious Cats July 24, 2007
Ligers Are Us!
These are real tiger-lion half cat breds.
Proper!
-sanster.net
Friday the 13th Story July 13, 2007
This is the most appropriate word of the day!
triskaidekaphobia \tris-ky-dek-uh-FOH-bee-uh\, noun:
A morbid fear of the number 13 or the date Friday the 13th.
My friend Lia had a party 7/13/07, and we told stories. Here’s mine:
The Dragon
By San Tong
The day I turned 18 I knew that it marked a significant time in my life. I had just recovered from months of physical therapy and being in the burn unit for 3 months after a car accident near my camp at Burning Man. My life was different now and what’s more was that my skin was scarred. My neck was like the surface of an alligator, crenelated and stiff. A scar ran down the right side of my neck covering halfway down my arm. I had mutant skin, layered and uneven, with scalloped edges and discoloration. It looked almost like scales, and although I was just beginning the healing process, I felt like this horrific physical deformity had already changed me forever. To mark this change, I became fixated on the idea of getting a tattoo to acknowledge that I looked like a monster, that something horrible had happened to my outer self. If I was going to live like this, I might as well bring attention to my skin in ways I myself chose. I rationalized that I did have a choice in the matter, and this marking was my way of showing the world I still had free will. I knew that anywhere I went, people would look at my face, perhaps to see if they recognized me; to determine the color of my eyes; the curve on my snarl; to see how my hair framed my face. But, after that instance, their eyes would become fixated as they scanned the latitude past my chin where the scarification began. It was some kind of hypnotic, Inevitable their whole beings would stop, still like ice, as our eyes met. Inevitable they did after they saw my neck. And that’s where their eyes would stay, where this scarification invoked thoughts of horror, of disgust, of pity.
They’d wonder how it happened. They were unnerved to see skin look inhuman. They wondered if there were skin grafting procedures to help. They’d think to themselves if they had seen such a thing before and if they knew a surgeon who was an expert in this kind of condition. Children stopped to point and stare and tug at their mother’s skirt. They didn’t have to say a word, as their mom would look my direction, and walk their children away so as not to have to explain to them why some people looked different. There wasn’t a miracle scarf or turtle neck sweater that could change who I had become. And, in my waking hours I felt it stir my senses, that in order to shed my scales, I had to transform myself.
If I got a tattoo across this eyesore on my neck, then it would be exercising some sort of choice in the manner. It was way of reclaiming my girly regard for my physical appearance. It was my revision to my history, and a imprint of my own doing. I had gotten past all the feelings of hate and of resentment. I no longer questioned why that car had to have a drunk driver behind the wheel, and why it was my tent that had to have been in the pathway of destruction. I set out to find the perfect design to adorn my unaffected side, and blend in with the mutant skin that formed on the other. I knew I wanted a dragon. This symbol of virulence with fire-breathing powers seemed to befit the condition that was the reason I wanted this tattoo in the first place. I always loved the deep green reptilian creature that had prowess and magical powers. It was neither a snake nor a any earthly creature. And it carried the fire I loved. I never cared much for the drum circles or drugs at Burning Man, but what drew me in, what put me in a trance, was the fire. We would spend all this time, hours upon hours, creating enormous things to burn: towers, and sculptures, and wooden worlds, and fun things like starfish and figures of Marilyn Monroe made out of anything flammable. And when all said and done, we took to the dry heat of the desert to destroy it all, to make it burn and disappear like a dream. It was therapeutic to see it all in roaring flames of blue and purple and deep dark red, and to exert the power to create and destroy all in a week’s time. One week, he time it took God to create earth. It was about drugs and communing with the desert landscape, to make a tribe blend in with the grains of sand that kicked up in epic storms. A lot of these wanderers came because they wanted to party, like lost nomads they came like fish to water. They carried in them a desire to swim upstream to an ocean of sand that felt like home. They liked the natural setting and the company. Me, I loved the flames, the fire, the energy and heat of the desert.
Ironically, it was fire that was literally eating me up, that night when the accident happened. It consumed an old soul that needed to be shed. All I remembered was that upon awakening to the sound of a car engine and the smell of gasoline, my chest felt like a ton of bricks as the smoke clouded my lungs with an excruciating heaviness. The fire came at me like waves rushing toward a shore, lapping angrily for the sins of man. And for a moment I was delirious from the motions, dazed by the brightness of the burning orange, and drunk with the sense that the new me was slowly surfacing thru the flames that engulfed me. I thought I was on my way to heaven and that this bright orange light was what you saw before death, and not the tunnel of white light you hear about.
But I was anything but serene, as the sting of burn began eating my skin. The heat was no longer beautiful to watch. The flames were now lapping me up in gulps and I could barely breathe any more.
I was finally ready to take the reins again and control the fire. My dragon was to be the symbol horrible aftermath. Fate has it’s own ways, I reasoned. Everyone ounce of energy left in me went into this dragon. From the ashes of my misery I conjured up the magical beast that would sooth my burdens, make me beautiful with it’s piercing eyes, it’s slithery girth. I sketched the dragon of my childhood, the mythical creature that felt like protection that I violently revered. I outlined its large scaly body, and the dragon’s tail swirled into rivers and eddies. The ink in my pen seemed to stream out with an inexplicable power. I felt power surge from the area injured on my neck, down my arm and right through my fingertips and down to my pen. It moved with a force that I barely controlled with my grip. It was almost alive and I felt a vigor that could only be compared to drinking the most potent caffeine from the poppy plant. I finished the sketch in a night and envisioned the tattoo to be green, with Medusa head of tails and small wings, and with flames shooting from its giant, toothy, gnarly orifice. The dragon was the most magnificent drawing I had ever done.
The next day I took it to a tattoo artist. When I put the drawing before the man, he gasped and asked where it had come from. He seemed stunned.
“I drew it,” I said.
“There is nothing I can do with this,” the man replied.
The man began to shake his head and refused to do the job with a look of fear in his eyes.
“Why,” I asked.
The man seemed perplexed and scared.
“I just can’t. Sorry.”
Unfazed, I decided to go elsewhere. The next tattoo artist reacted in the same way. He refused an explanation as to why my drawing could not be used. My frustration grew as it seemed that no one wanted my business. I wanted this desperately. A friend had told me about an artist out of the way who had done a tattoo for her. I went to Jack to see if he’d do it. I walked into Jack of Arts TattooZoo a bit skeptical. Jack was a middle-aged man wearing a leather vest over a tattered black t-shirt. He had greasy hair and an unsteady look to him. He had a tribal looking pattern that blanketed the left side of his face down to where his shirt began. It looked like a labyrinth of square lines carefully etch-a-sketched across the area above his neck, bifurcating into two distinct sections. I wondered what Jack would look like unshaven and if his entire body was half tattooed down to his toes. He had dark black hair and green eyes. He staggered to the counter. Behind him there were sketches in pencil and charcoal. There was an enormous skull of a bull hanging on the wall. It had a thick layer of dust and sand that hadn’t been touched since the day it was put there. He pierced the silence, greeting me with the slow and slurred hello. I placed the sketch firmly on the counter before him, littered with plain business cards, pens, and a book of tattoo options. Jack took one look at my sketch and a wide smile grew from the corners of his lips. I couldn’t look him in the eye because his face looked asymmetrical to me, but I liked the discomfort I felt because likened it to the same discomfort people felt when they saw my scar.
“Do you know what you’re getting yourself into here?
He asked, with a Southern drawl.
“I’m not sure why everyone thinks this is such an odd request.”
“I’ll have to be honest, that others have refused to do this tattoo, and I don’t know why.”
I drew it myself. “Dragons are so common. What’s the big deal,” I asked.
“This tattoo happens to have special powers and without knowledge of it, it can be dangerous, “said Jack.
“I have seen this dragon twice before in my life, and I cannot tell you exactly what will happen to you, but if you get this tattoo, you will be consumed by it’s heat, but the power it possesses.
“ You have to ask yourself if you want this responsibility.
Are you ready to play with fire little girl, “ he asked.
I didn’t like his patronizing tone, but was fascinated at once.
“Do you want this gig or not,” I asked entranced by his gaze.
He gave a nod of affirmation with a devious smile and with that we began the process. I stripped down to my tank top and sat down in an old black leather chair, the coolness of the worn-in surface seeped through my exposed arms. Getting this tattoo almost as painful as having my skin burned off. But my determination never wavered, as I winced through the tiny pin pricks and nodded off to the sound of the instrument inking my flesh till the pain startled me. As Jack did the deed I was overtaken by a sensation that incident at Burning Man was happening all over again. The fire was alive and flames danced in circles flirting with it’s playful flickering. The orange and deep red and yellow glow was all around me. I could see a sandstorm in the distance out of the corner of my eye as I relished the same pain I experienced; it was an identical sensation. And when it was finished I looked down at my arm I saw a beautiful interwoven patchwork on my skin, of green ink of, flames of orange, yellow, red, and the dragon’s eyes took on a deep vermilion that pierced like a laser. This was me. A dragon leaping from my skin, allowing the real me to burst thru the scales I had shed.
vona benefit.. January 18, 2007
Here’s the vona event and the excerpts i read:
San Tong lives in Los Angeles. She works at an advertising agency, while pursuing various writing projects. She was the Visual Director for Theater Group called Mango Tribe, an APIA women’s theatre production group founded on the belief that collective creation is often the most powerful form of art. She was also a literary manager for the 5th Night Screenplay and Short Film Series at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
1.18.07 (VONA fundraiser)
Distillation Poem:
History kept getting confused.
She was put on this earth to excavate the truths that transcended
territorial borders,
bayonets,
and good foreign policy.
She transcended the bond between
mother
and
child
and for that her sacrifice was great
Neurosis and madness can birth greatness,
but not everyone makes it thru to the other side.
And what she bore changed how a generation regarded the word
“rape” and the phrase
“occupation.”
“I do the work I do so that my grandfather’s death in the hands of the
soldiers was not in vain,
I ask for an apology.
I ask for reparations.
I have not forgotten and neither have a generation still scarred by
Nanking atrocities.”
Some called her a liar, a rabble-rouser.
But she believed that there is fairness in love and war.
She sought truth, but madness drove her to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Excerpt from Longer Fiction Piece:
From then on, she always believed the moon to be heaven. The river was a mirror to show off her beauty and grace. Heaven was a place that teased earth with her beauty and calm. And mortals like her had only to look up at it to see its splendor. So every night, she said a little prayer that soon she’d be there to hug the moon when it was full and to cradle and spoon it when it was a crescent. It was a place where there was no pain. It was now her third full moon cycle at the house of comfort. Marukumoto, the soldier who had taken ownership of her had either been killed or transferred to another part of China. She didn’t know what happened to him. She did not love him, but understood that in war she would be a fool not to take any special treatment she could get. But now, things were miserable.
When Marukumoto was still around, she thought that he was slowly falling in love with her. She’d never felt anything like it before, but she couldn’t release herself to love him completely simply because he was the one she lost her virginity to. He was her first and it was not by choice. It was him and 2 other soldiers that had forced their way into her family’s home. Her mother was in the kitchen washing rice. The loud sound of the rice clinking against the metal bowl they used each night must have drowned out the sound of the soldier’s footsteps against the dirt road leading up to their hut. They must have stabbed her in the back from behind. She barely heard her scream, but heard the bowl crash to the ground, the round metal circling on the ground a few times before settling on the floor frozen in time. The rice was thrown into the air like confetti before landing. By the time Yishun was forced to discover her mother, she was a curled up ball, hunched over on the floor, in a pool of blood, rice scattered on the ground beside her. This was the first snapshot of Yishun’s hell on earth. Reincarnation might have graced her with an easier fate.
San
see comments, rewrites, and drafts… January 15, 2007
martin luther king day was a great day for writing…any day is a good day to write.
if you are a tiger, i just wanted to say that this would be a great tool for posting your writing, formatted onto one page. on a larger scale it’s self-publishing of sorts, but on a smaller scale, this is a good way of parking your stuff, documenting your process, or other such nonsense…
so this little meta tag could say: here’s caroline and karen’s comments from the 2/23/07 sesh! Good job, ladies…
etc.etc.etc. my mantra: “for 2007 is, live online, write online.”
missed the VONA reading, check out the post on the site.
breathe in, breathe out…
still there…ah..the only problem with writing is it’s so isolating. oh well, you can’t have everything. so, feel free to add comments. I love feedback of any kind. tell me if this is lousy, or my grammar sucks, or if you hate the girly interface…no, but seriously. there are messages here at this site, so check in every once in a while, and you will find little surprises embedded.
over’n out
www.sanster.net
