doldrums

nothing to do. while the white world outside lays still. tap fingers, move toes. crack neck and cough and swallow. drink orange gatorade. smoke a bowl of fine grape diesel. tick off seconds on the clock. what's next what's next. if you don't think too hard about it it'll happen. if you don't think. a watched pot does not boil. boils slower. seems to. anyway.

i get asked by this girl i work with. tell me a story, she says, and she doesn't want me to tell her a story like Tom Nero. she wants a funny, sick, perverse or entertaining tale. she wants a blockbuster and i want to tell arthouse. she asks me what i'm reading and i tell her it's Ulysses. she has never heard of it. i show her some and she shakes her head. her forehead abruptly furrows downward. she doesn't know. doesn't much care.

so there too. standing. wasting time while the people chew contentedly. chew and drink. masticate and gorge. margarita, glass of water. rocks - no salt. most people don't say rocks, but this one did. says it so quick it's like a little switchblade coming out of her mouth. her companion - middle-aged, barn coat, wisping white hair and aviator-frame bifocals - purses his jowls (or tries) and orders a non-alcoholic beer. she is agitated. fingers and toes, tapping. biting around her nails, the skin, tugging with first her dextral incisor, then the sinistral. her eyes lock on the old man. he is full of rheum and coughs like a bellows. i have the image of Stephen Dedalus and his room full of students in my head. discussing the Pyrrhic victory. it is not easy to read James Joyce in that room. i try anyway. once i even lay it out so that someone can see. this is vain and causes me to turn gray on the inside, just slightly, and later out of guilt tuck it away. ashamed.

a cigarette, every hour. more standing, close-mouthed, but at least i'm outside. i like the cold. relish it. the gradual numbing of my ungloved fingers, the sting of an impish wind lashing at my bare face. some people walk eyes down, neck bent, hooded and gloved. older folk do. walk slowly over grayed-out rises of ice and tamped-down snow, clutching to one another as though they were enduring their own private earthquake.

she laughs at me and tries to rile me up while we are in that stasis of customers. we lean against the station and keep our eyes on our tables. she tries to tickle me but i'm not ticklish. she whispers, low, menacing, in my ear, "fuck you." but i can't help it and i laugh. she could mean it. she could hate my guts. but it's unlikely. i drift into an alternate world where what i fear is real and unravel the consequences and ramifications. it is entertaining for a second but ultimately i abandon it.

they say only boring people get bored. i have heard that humans are the only thing to experience boredom. some people glamourize it and give it a stage name: "ennui," or "accidie." which makes it sound less banal, i think. a tinge of Keats in the sound. a fragile sigh.

it is a slow night and the bartender's been playing cannonball adderley for a while now. it's pleasant. there is a dull uproar which swells and falls like waves from the intoxicated crowd at the bar. they are all friends, or at least, they seem to be. the roar and thud and smash of the kitchen, a tumult of frenzied activity. i imagine it as a pit of wild dogs, all howling and snarling and raging against their short chains. i know that this is hyperbolic but i enjoy the image anyway. i am aware of every sound. when the hush of closing sweeps the floor, we carry out our duties. fill the sauces. called 'marrying' them. replace the napkins, switch the menus. i am tired and so is she. we can - both of us - taste the alcohol sparking in our mouths, feel it white-hot in our skulls.

we will turn the lights up and do one last sweep. sit in a makeshift counting-house, multiply and subtract and divide.

end up drunk and high and white-faced in the yellow wash of the desk light. enumerate all the things i could be doing but which i am not. not just in this one night, no. in my whole life. from now to finish. feel like an elastic band and can see one in my mind's eye, collapsing, tautening, collapsing again. then the deluge of exhaustion, tumbling down like Jericho. breath suddenly deeper, as though my body's pneumatics are forcing me to sleep, urging, inveigling. one more cigarette. standing. thinking. the muffled tick of my shitty watch, sharp and martinet-like in the dark. the stars above and their vague intimations. standing in the gray waste of days-old snow and thin, brittle tree-branches. count the bricks on the building in front of me. put the cigarette out. return indoors. sleep. always, at the end, sleep.

colder

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.