29 Oct 2007
I got brunch with mike
during which I did obscenities for an hour
He said: “How’s it going?”
I said “I lost my glasses”
He said “Where?”
I looked at him for a long time. “I don’t know”
He said “What are you going to do?”
I said “I’m going to commit suicide”
He said “When you could just get a new pair”
I said “Yes”
There was a catholic street festival outside
a thousand peruvians in purple capes
something for their patron saint
whose name Mike pronounced correctly
to which I said “Shit”
and “the only thing they understand is force”
The peruvians had silver jars of smoking frankencense
which apparently is a disgusting spice
the end
The town was on a beige patch
in a blonde terrain
tent cities of bleached ribcages
half in a wooden hill half in this rising wind
eight or five of these lean tos
holding into the ground
there probably are no metaphors
it was simple and straightforward
half in the rising wind
at night not long before the sky warmed up
it was briefly green
i don’t want to say much about it
we got there i don’t remember by private car
or train or was there one leg at night by horseback
A few notes in May. I will have you know. I have an episode of time travel in the afternoon, a bit of relief from years ago. I go forward a bit. In the park listening to a man immaculately dressed all in rabbit and dark linen with a rare sensibility. He’s yelling now on the same subject he was whispering from before. Up ahead and through the fences the green canopy comes to earth in the form of Y’s, slingshots or dowsing rods, whole stands of elm and their crooked societies on the forest floor, crooked legs, sunbathing.
At the restaurant they make the perfect thing, I take it home in a cardboard box and eat it. I buy two and eat them both. The second covered in extra sauce is ruined. There is no difference between the two. The first two are both perfect. In a pastry box. The second one however is ruined. In between them having breathed briefly out, there are no longer two. Just the one. I ruin it with extra sauce. Moving so slowly and at such altitude after eating the first. The first satellites were me, hovering just above the arm of a couch, ruining things with sauce.
In the new world every sound is particularly loud, a discrete yell. Every click and touch of finger to fiber board, every blink and footstep. Every uttered consonant, every disturbance, the wet air in aggregate being pulled across the landscape by dry air someplace else.
I go down an alley and come upon a huge new territory. Behind a church there are the working remnants of a medieval complex, blocks and blocks long, all eroded limestone overrun by tall grass, ceremonial courtyards and crypt entrances. I cannot figure out what the boundaries are. It’s vital and deserted by people. I’ve never seen this on any map. There is no space for it.
As I walk an old woman comes out of a doorway at high speed. She’s hunched over and has hair as big as she is, going back to her waist, in huge thick wooly bands. She’s either sick or dead but really moving. I make a noise so she’ll look at me, so I will get killed and die.
Someone came up with new flight paths, or there’s a disturbance someplace else. All the planes are being sent now overhead of my apartment in the geographic center of the city, and they’re accelerating. Maybe it’s just the weather. In spring the sound carries differently. Does sound like fresh air, or do planes like it? Sound is warm, so it rises in cold air. Are there no clouds? What was the density of the air before? Was it very dense? I am hearing sirens all the time, protests, fires, yelling and screaming. But there is some levity to these noises, because the air is different. No one will ever die. You can get a good look at their eyeballs now. Clearly this levity is the thing. More planes, one after another, like an accident, like they’re trying to get them all down at once, to free up the sky for spiders.
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep is actually good at only two things. 1.) collaborating with the film industry on the character Meryl Streep, and 2.) playing tetris on her son’s gameboy. Her inner life is a singular compulsion of fitting and ill-fitting blocks, her time is measured in double-A batteries, and she has been like this since 1992 or 1993.
She plays while she’s on the telephone. She plays in her trailer. She plays on the plane, in the town car, in bed at the hotel, in bed at home. She plays in the bath tub, in her dressing room, in the kitchen waiting for the microwave to finish. She plays with the sound turned off. An assistant reads scripts aloud while Meryl Streep plays Tetris, learning her lines.
In many ways this makes her the opposite of Johnny Depp. The main differences are that Meryl Streep is somehow lying, and Johnny Depp doesn’t play Tetris.
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp’s idea of himself is exactly the same as your idea of him, which makes him a unique being — a round number. An example. It may seem difficult to accurately imagine Johnny Depp in a public restroom, washing his hands, but if you can imagine him doing it, it is exactly like that. And when he washes his hands he has the same experience that you do imagining it: I may not know what this is like, but if I can believe I am doing it, then it is like that.
Johnny Depp’s voice is the only thing about him that seems one way to him, and another way to everyone else. To him it seems certain and full, very robust. Where you and I might hear Johnny Depp wandering in questions, he hears himself making statements. Statement statement statement. This is Johnny Depp’s sole incongruity, which has mostly become unnoticeable to him, and which we have never noticed, or needed to.
Woke up at seven, showered, dressed, ate breakfast, and went back to bed. A lot of germans in the neighborhood today, well dressed and attractive. A holiday weekend for them. Hitler’s birthday?
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