NEEDLING

Having a bit of a non-inspired last few days. Read the story *BD* 11 1 86 by Joyce Carol Oates in the Fiction issue 2005 of The Atlantic monthly magazine, and it’s been giving me nightmares. At first, it starts out banal enough, drab realism, taking place in a high school – as far as I’m concerned, teenagers are ugly vindictive little shits with pimples, and I talk from personal experience from both ends of the stick – but then the story slowly changes, becomes strange, the suspense builds, while you’re thinking, OK, this is obvious... (can’t say anymore)...

I can’t remember my dreams from last night, or rather from earlier this morning, it’s been too long since I’ve gotten out of bed. I was living through some weird shit when I woke up early this morning, then I closed my eyes back up out of laziness, not wanting to get out of bed, and went back to uninspired sleepless sleep, during which I forgot the earlier dreams. All I remember is that I was living through the last episode of a television series, and they were showing all the big moments of the series. The series had been about a regular city bus that takes its route everyday from one end of the city to the other, and all the people it picks up. Every episode, then, takes place in the bus, starting whenever the driver puts on his driver’s hat, turns the ignition on, and starts off before the day has even started. Everyday, he picks up the regulars, as well as all kinds of other people, and the episode is about that, what happens in the bus, what people talk about, the meeting of strangers, accidental meetings, the regulars who become friends or weird acquaintances by seeing each other everyday. We also go into the lives of each bus rider, their personal stories, et cetera. Of course, this being my dream, some of the special moments were for example close-ups on one guy swallowing something horrible, swelling his throat several times over - we could see it go down his throat while he sat at the diner table - which then made him throw up and die a terrible death, all of this in close-up, but not only this... there was also an eighty year old Chaplin character who would everyday at his bus-stop let everybody get in before he did – the driver was in on this – and would let the bus slowly start up again before running after the bus, grabbing a hold of the back, climbing on, and making his way to the back door – I don’t even know if public busses in Austin have back doors? Like they do in Paris? – and letting himself in. He had been a secret agent for Scotland Yard in his younger days. All along, the other passengers saying stuff like, “and you know, he’s past eighty years of age,” “Wow, that’s amazing, how he does such thing...” All along the old man giving us a Chaplinesque show, except one day he slips, lets go of the handle-bars and dies... his ghost jumps out looking exactly like Chaplin with the hat and the cane, running along side the bus saying goodbye to the other passengers, before being picked up by a flying ghost car and flying / disappearing away. Various images are coming back to me. The plot isn’t, though... there was a plot as well, which I can’t remember. I was somehow involved, watching it on a big screen, sitting on a couch which was really modern art and not meant to be sat upon, but I did anyway because I didn’t see the logic of having a couch in front a large screen television, one you are currently watching with some other people, and not being able to sit on said couch. It felt ridiculous to me. All the other people were sitting on the floor being mad at me for being so disrespectful.

(Last night, I was drinking Dubonnet red. Then I switched to cheap Lone Star beers in long neck bottles. I also ate a raw steak of salmon fish, to see what it would be like. I loved it. I eat sushi all the time, and I was wondering if it wouldn’t be more financially interesting to simply buy a large piece of salmon, rather than buying a bunch of tiny pieces wrapped in rice and seaweed paper. But like the sushi chef was telling me the other day, certainly I could try, but the fish he used and the fish sold for cooking weren’t put through the same reglementary controls.)