lately everything's rushing. suddenly the house is ten degrees colder and the floorboards shrink. heaters switched on. winter comes down like a bomb in the sky, even though the colours of the trees are as bright as hell's flags still. and not even halloween yet.
a kind of battening-down process. i'm backing up all my data in case of another hard drive catastrophe. cleaned up and rearranged my room. books all in alpha-order. all things in their right places. burning data to hard copy. settling down again. like a dog in a circle before laying down with a great sigh. and the more i think about time, the more time thinks about me, and then i'm crushed under its momentary consideration of my existence.
met a right asshole in the bar the other night. rush, or raj. i'm going to bet the actual name was raj due to his accent and skin color but i'm going to call him rush because it seems more appropriate. half-cocked, going off, un poco triste, my little lemming-mind jumping off the glass cliff into an alcohol ocean. standing to one side, watching - and then the momentary victory. connection, and a good one, a male-female connection, and what electricity - her smile, her laugh. a fantastic conversation lasting through two - no, three! - cigarettes, and the eventual return to her glowering companion, rush, astride his barstool. i am inflamed, have been, all day - all week! - with the private correspondence of H. Miller and L. Durrell. have devoured The Colossus of Maroussi, have embarked on Prospero's Cell. obviously when one reads about the apotheosis of place such as Miller and Durrell made Greece (and surrounds), there is a longing that shows up. for travel. for the past. nostalgia for these things which have not yet happened or never will. i am going off, a roman candle with a fuse a mile long, how much i'd love to see Greece, the Mediterranean
and Rush, good old motherfucking Rush, barging in. this is where my memory gets hazy. where psychic damage sets in. his false impressions of me, his generalizations, his aggrandizement - all of it. so much and so virulent. i feel like i'm in the middle of a swarm of wasps. he gets up to use the bathroom and Maria is explaining that i am "doing the right thing, exactly as i should," as though i am winning a game. the scene is becoming drastically skewed, like a fucked-up dream. i imagine the floor to be collapsing. or the ceiling. Maria wants me to meet her friend. Kirsten. she likes me, i think, or is entertained by me, neither of which i mind at this point - she tells me to write my email down. my phone number. asks me to be discreet in some way, slip it to her by way of some complicated scheme that both of us are too drunk to execute - but then there is Polyphemus again, rounding the corner from the bathroom. perhaps neither Rush nor Raj is appropriate but a slightly different phonic: Rage. he sits again beside me and strikes up the same conversation as before - i have no doubt in my head that he is smarter than Maria is drunk and so i do not slip her the piece of paper. he would see right through my ruse.
this continues. for far too long. eventually i leave. taking too much of the drunkard's skewering "observations" to heart. the only way i can deal with it is pretending it doesn't matter. another drunken conversation. another bar. no - scratch that. the same fucking bar. one of the same.
so, another cold. the rain sluices down today. it's no longer that the wind is cold, but the air itself. the space around everything. shrinking. freezing.
more layers. insulate.
