NEEDLING

VIRUS AND CONFUSED STATE

A new wave of computer virus has invaded the virtual world. I was not spared. This last Saturday, I fought tooth and nails, keyboard and pop-up blues, trying to save my machine from the big bad wolf of lala land, the bed bugs that lay their eggs not underneath your skin but inside the very virtual life-line of your machine making you their unbeknownst slaves and executioners of more virtual pirate action infecting your friends and family attached to you through this new generation post-birth umbilical cord linking all of us to the new mother Big Bertha, the virtual goddess loaded with virtual cannonballs created by the machination and perversity of our modern age holding a siege around the fortress of our soul...

When one does not know what one is talking about then one should keep quiet and not speak out loud and unclear about what one does not understand… I disagree. Speak, my child, my fool, my irate virtual glob-trotter. I am the fool with the electronic bedbugs, fighting them as best as I can, not knowing what I am doing.

We live in a world where nothing is quite ever real. I look out past the metal bars outside my window – no, I do not live in a prison, I live in a big city and my window gives directly onto a sort of fake courtyard to which there is no access except from the public clinic underneath my studio, to whom this courtyard belongs and the reason for which I have bars on my window… supposedly to keep the clinic people out, but I believe also to keep me in – I look out past these white painted metal bars (useless detail… does it matter that they are white, rusted, and dirty?) and I see across the street the same buildings I’ve been staring out for the last six years, windows through which I cannot see because of the reflection of the sun, but from which they – whoever they are – can see me, and have been watching me now for all these years. I didn’t always have a job as I do now, and I would sometimes spend my whole day, several of them at a time, weeks, staring out of my window into nothing. More often than not drinking myself to death, dancing around my studio naked or in my shorts, trying to write bad poetry, reciting them over and over again trying to decode their hidden truth if there was any truth to be found, usually not, and putting them down on my screen. Mostly, though, I sat staring out my window wondering what the hell I was doing in my prison. I even tried to write a short story about it. I’ve written it and re-written it several times and it remains like what I’m doing here: a bad piece of writing. Because I misunderstand what the non-see-through windows have to tell me. I’m sure of this.

Hum... re-reading myself I realize I say absolutely nothing. I start saying a few different things, and end up talking about something else not finishing anything that I started. Oh well...

I sat down in front of this machine wanting to write about Paris. How I feel about Paris, what it feels like to live here being non-French French (I’ve never been anything but French as far as the law is concerned, but I grew up as an illegal alien in the Texas bible belt…) and whether or not I feel as if I’m a Parisian after more than six years living here, even if I constantly misspell EVERY word in French I attempt to write down. Somehow, I never got around to writing about that subject at all, not even a little hint… I’ll do that later... the trouble is, is that I don't know what the hell I was trying to say at all...