Kintsugi Allergy

CRIT
07-19-02023

There are these times — times when I’m thinking too much, about too much — that I get this gross urge to throw something. I’m glad I brought my own mug to the café today. It’d be kinda pathetic to throw a to-go cup — hear a flaccid *SCHPLAT and watch it stop, drop, n’ roll a sad little milky arc. My mug’s got a heft to it. It could shatter that mirror in the corner, if I aim good. I imagine throwing it, letting the scene loop in my mental. Everything I throw in my imagination is a fucking bull-eye.

But I’m not throwing the mug. I’m too tall, frowned, and triggering to get away with it. I’d just end up giving some café custie a fresh trauma; selling another copy of The Body Keeps the Score. Sometimes the most progressive act I can pull off is to swallow a hot load of rage.


I’m fronting though. Really, I’m not so brave. Like, that same feeling makes me want to punch the wall when I get home. No one’s around, but I still don't. I’m afraid my weak-ass fist will hit a stud and shatter like a teacup. I’d have to call a friend and get her to drive me to urgent care, like a dweeb. Maybe it could be a bonding thing for us, scheming the cheapest way to get me fixed up. We could think up fake names to give the healers. Angel names like Gabriel, Jarameel, or Metatron.



I’ve only been to urgent care once, five years ago, when I cut my leg hella bad on some barbed wire. That slinky-looping stuff, with the tiny flat knives all over it like charms on a bracelet. I was trying to get this chihuahua out of a fenced-in lot for my friend Val. It wasn’t her chihuahua, but she thought it was stuck in there and wanted to save it. I didn’t think it was stuck, but I was in love with Val. In love in this way where both of us knew, but pretended not to know because knowing off-mute would fuck up our cease-fire friendship. She was in a long distance relationship with a dude in LA, but was insecure and lonely. To keep a wing seat, I made myself into an amusing, validating side-kick. I don’t know man, it was rough, I was 20.


I didn’t even get the dog. It bolted through a fence hole on the other side of the lot. That was fine with me, I was only doing it for Val — doing it to show her that I was the type-o-dude to, like, ‘step up’ or something.


She seemed satisfied.


There was this small bit of fence where some wire had been clipped away, but it was too small I guess, because when I swung my leg over it stopped mid arc. I looked back and one of those tiny knives is buried to the hilt in my calf. I panicked, tugged back and fell off the fence like a fucking dork, my leg gushing. Val couldn’t hang with the sight of the blood. She said it made her nauseous. So she sat in the back seat while I drove her car to my apartment with my shirt wrapped around my leg. From there, she peaced out and I got an Uber to urgent care. I thought I’d freak the driver, but he was cool about it. He was from Cambodia.



It was late when I got there and no one was around who could stitch me up, but they said I could chill in the waitroom until a doc showed up. This dude in the folding chair next to me had his thumb wrapped in a bloody pair of Minecraft boxers. We got to chatting and he said my leg didn’t look that bad and I could probably shut it with some super glue. That sounded cheaper and faster than sitting in a folding chair, uninsured, bleeding through a UNIQLO undershirt. So I got another Uber home and my roomie gave me this bottle of super glue left over from their Yu-Gi-Oh cosplay build. It was dyed gold, but I didn’t think that mattered. When my roomie saw it she said I'd made myself into a human Kintsugi.


Kintsugi was this Japanese thing where you repair a busted teacup or something by sticking the pieces back together with melted gold. The result was a cup with shiny gold stripes where the cracks had been. Every Instagram account with more than eight followers was posting about it at the time. It was such a stupid-simple my-busted-life-is-prettier-cause-it's-busted metaphor, that no one could pass on the validation. Another reason to throw this mug against the wall, if I could afford the gold.



That might have been the last time I saw Val. Her boyfriend got in a gnar motorcycle accident and she went back to LA to play Florence Nightingale. The whole affair became a popular Instagram love story. I got to watch her help him learn to walk again, watch him propose to her at the PT center, and watch her say ‘YES!’ through tears of fucking joy while ladies in Scrubs clapped. A real Kintsugi romance. They came out of it with ½ a million followers each.


My leg Kintsugi got all swollen and red for a week or two. I was hella scared it got infected, but it turned out to be a reaction to the stuff that made the glue gold. Kintsugi allergy . . .

figures.


These memories pop up like swamp bubbles while I’m trying to watch this Netflix doc on human cloning. I’m brooding too palatably to focus though. It’s scored by Dan Deacon, which is the only reason I’m scoping it. I’ve been listening to his music a lot lately. Yesterday, my friend sent me this link to an old clip of him playing on a local morning show called something cringe like ‘The Sunrise Hour’ or ‘Coffees Hot!’. Danny Boy’s wearing two-tone Elvis glasses and too-small-T that says ‘GOAL!’. In front of him is this table with a sine-wave synth the size of dead goat—wires sticking out all over—hooked up to a Fisher Price looking keyboard. The news anchor asks him where he got all this stuff. He says, “the trash,” but not in a rude way; he talks with the anchorman as if they’re waiting for the same bus.



When he gets playing it’s like jumping in a rainbow ball-pit. Candy-coated blippi-blops patty-caking with grainy drum machine rifts. All the while Dan’s singing through a microphone filtered to make him sound like a squirrel parade.


♫ We're talking paper forks now! ♫

♫ We're talking bacon cuts now! ♫

♫ We're talking turkey, talking turkey, walking every cluck now! ♫


It was so unapologetically weird, like he didn’t need anything from his audience but their eyes. Not applause, not love, just a riveted gaze.


♫ We're talking 16 ska bands! ♫

♫ We're talking 19 ska bands! ♫


It was funny, seeing this all juxed up against the staple-grin fakeness morning news shows had back then. In Dan charges, with his freaky song made from garbage, and, somehow, I felt like I was looking straight into his soul. It bummed me out a little. I started feeling like I’d never been that honest in my whole life.


♫ We're talking rooty suits and rooty boots and sooty moots do! ♫

Where did this mug even come from? It just showed up one day like a stray. It’s lumpy and too thick — the color of a week-old bruise. But it feels like it was made by someone, I don’t know, sincere? It would be so easy to smash it, easy as sin. It wouldn’t take anything.


The other last time I saw Val was three years ago at a Dan Deacon show. I can’t be sure, but I saw someone leaning against a wall, looking at their phone, that looked just like her. Val had this button nose with this tiny up-turn. It was unbearably cute and hard to forget. Even now, thinking about it, like . . . still.


Anyway, I froze, feeling like I was gagging on some gasoline-flavored Proustian macaroon. Then she looked up and I went into total flight mode. That was the only time I’ve strong armed my way through a concert crowd to get to the stage. You gotta understand, I’d been white-knuckling life since she moved back to LA. At the time . . . locking eyes with her? I couldn’t do it. Maybe now, but not then. Her eyes felt like still a couple of mirrors, and I wasn’t trying to spot my reflection.



I tried to focus on the show, let blow me out of myself. But it all started to be about Val of course. It was kinda trippy though. It wasn’t, like, about wanting her to love me. I’d near-purged that wish I guess. It was more about wanting me to love me, without having to pass it through Val first — hell, through anything first. The big blow came during a part of the last song.


♫ And the Earth looked at me ♫

♫ And said: 'wasn't that fun?’ ♫

♫ And I replied: ‘I'm sorry, if I hurt anyone’ ♫


I started crying and made for the doors.


I was out on the street as the song was ending, hearing it fade like the last grains in an hourglass . . . one I wasn’t sure I could flip. I could have found Val after the show, but no way she wanted that weight anymore.

I’m fronting though. Really, I’m not so brave.


♫ As I fell asleep softly at the edge of a cave ♫

♫ But I should have gone deeper ♫

♫ But I'm not so brave ♫