Sixty before they speak to anyone.
I feel like ass today. I'm sick and home at the Nunnery, convalescing. I'm sure it seems to you like I never go to my office anymore. You must have noticed how I'm always writing about not going into work, but I have to tell you, from my perspective, it feels different. It feels like I'm forever at the office, almost never setting foot back home.
However that may be, I am truly sick - I've got a cold and I feel lousy, though you'll be happy to know I still look damn good. Damn good, that is, if you're into the unwashed, hair jumping in a dozen different directions, still wearing the same clothes I slept in last night which are the same clothes I wore to work yesterday look. And here's what else. If you could hear me speak right now, you'd swear to god you were listening to either a frog or some kind of a toad or something. My voice is deep and fucked.
Anyway, the reason I'm so sick is because I allowed myself to do something really stupid three or four days ago. So stupid... I should know better by now, really.
It's been a week of the past here in Bedlam, meaning that several things from the distant yesternow have presented themselves this week as if for inspection. A couple of girls I used to know, A and K; Jonathan, an old friend who used to work for me around the office (You: yeah, back when you actually used to spend time in your office. Sabitathica: shut up.); and yesterday, old friend Kennon 'phoned drunk from Korea. None of these people have I seen for anywhere between three and seven years, all of them appearing out of the fabric of the past to say hello and reminisce. It's nice when the past behaves.
I think I said about how I'm reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Goddamn this book is good. For all the bleakness and sadness and desolation, his future is a place steeped in vigilant goodness and a deep, careful love. But it's dark too. Very dark. Real fucking dark, so don't say you weren't warned. Favorite line from today: There is no God and we are his prophets.
A father and son walk through a lifeless landscape, no food anywhere, burdening their belongings before them in a shopping cart, unable to see the sun for all the soot in the air. It's fifty pages before they see another living person, sixty before they speak to anyone. And the future is so rawboned and worn it evidently can't spare any punctuation. Commas are a luxury and nobody ever, ever uses quotation marks when they speak. Too precious, we presume, or maybe this place is too intimate for anybody to nitpick about such things. And even when we encounter the occasional contraction, there's rarely an apostrophe to be found.
Plus I've watched several DVDs in my convalescence. Here's a(n incomplete) list:
Amores Perros
Ocean's 11
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Belle de Jour
Sabotage (Hitchcock)
Listening now to Shh/Peaceful from In a Silent Way. I'll be posting a few photographs soon.
