February 14, 2013
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waxing crescent
I was dreaming when I heard a loud bang on the door upstairs. In my dream an old high school teacher had brought over dozens of people to watch a horror movie in my room. I hate horror movies and so I explored the basement where I live and found nine (I counted in the dream; I was excited) toy castles in a back room, and I also found a secret room (which Alex suggested we rent out). I was also avoiding a boxing match with a boy half my size because I was nervous.
This was when I woke from the pounding. I wasn’t sure it was the door until they tried the bell. I bolted upstairs and walked in the front room just as they came in the door. It was a man who looked exactly like John Travolta and I realized that I was in the movie Pulp Fiction and that I was going to die because this man was going to kill me. He turned out to be a coworker of my housemate, who was late getting up and was going to miss his flight.
Alex had come downstairs and we were a little frazzled until we found out it was 11:30. ’We should pay someone to do that.’
‘Do you hate everything still?’
‘I haven’t been awake long enough to hate anything.’ (He he had had a rough night.)
I didn’t know what to eat for breakfast so I ate everything I had. Alex joined me later and he told me about an article he had read about people that disappeared. I wrote ‘Somerton man’ on a piece of paper and slid it across the table and later when he came back downstairs we talked about it in very excited voices while he cooked breakfast. (He can’t eat right when he gets up.)
He conquered Europe upstairs while I spent time with Virginia in the living room. It was snowing. I thought of walking to the park and smiling and saying hi to people I saw. I scratched out the plan in my mind though, like it was an attempt to do a math problem I knew I couldn’t do.
‘So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen asleep, she thought, were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They had no suffering there, she thought.’
Entire parts of my room have been dark for months. The reason is that I needed to go the store and buy the lights for them. Stores are nearby until you have something you need to get from them. I built the lamp and it wobbled so I put it in the living room. ’When did you get that?’ he asked. ’Christmas,’ I said, and he laughed.
I washed the dishes and counters while Alex spent time with Cicero in the living room. We had a home day. We didn’t have any cheese and I realized this just as I was making dinner. I would not be defeated; Kroger is right across the street. ’You’re going to buy cheese right now?’ he asked a little stunned. ’Our pantry is huge,’ I explained. ‘We just have to pay for things from it.’
(The snow was gone; already?)
I spent some time with a police officer in the evening. He told me his shift ended at eight. I thought about that later on. What if in the middle of a gun fight in a bank the police officer went ‘Well it’s four o clock! Good fight. Money’s all yours.’ I mean really we have been brainwashed with super hero movies where the heroes are always ready to just burst into action. But let’s be real. They would have shifts. A man has to be home for dinner.
Laura and I drove to a talk on death and dying. On the way there we agreed: Age of Adz is a definite kind of mood. And what sort of love life does Sufjan even have?
In the question and answer period one philosophy professor said he wanted to talk about some zen-type ideas. But the speaker said, ‘That’s not zen. That idea is more daoist.’ There was some disputing about it but the speaker said ‘Who’s teaching Asian philosophy this semester? I didn’t want to have to play that card.’ So the questioner backed off from the claim about his idea being a zen one. After the issue was over the next questioner stepped up and said ‘So basically that was zen, this is dao.’
Afterwards I talked to a new guy and he asked how life was going and I said pretty bad and we had a great time talking. Another guy I talked to had no idea who I was. I told him that we had hung out several times, that we had gone out to a restaurant and had a long conversation. Everything we had talked about seemed familiar to me still and I asked about his poetry and his church, and eventually he remembered who I was.
A girl was over with Alex when I got home and we all went out to TeeJaye’s (which is only 2/3rds of a cigarette’s walk from our house). We had a chaotic conversation about chaos. Milan was on facebook on her phone and I blamed us for not being more entertaining. At this point Alex was playing with the ketchup and he squirted it all over his sweater. ’Taking one for the team.’
I talked to Milan about her work at the table as Alex showered because he had gotten ketchup on his sweater. Nick came home and told us about the Verizon millionaires he had met and the Covenant-of-the-Ark warehouse he had been in. We told him we had found his cardigan in the freezer in the morning.
I picked a book off Alex’s shelf and came downstairs. People headed to bed. The day was over.
And those are all the words I have to say about it.
