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needles needling needlessly with little thread... or much of anything else...

(foolish dribbles to be written at uncertain times, on an irregular basis, from uncertain sections of the ever expending universe, and from whatever dimension I-We-Us-Them might find ourselves/ myself in …)

Sunday, October 30, 2005

ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE 


Waking up feeling like a retarded pancake. The neighbor’s dog is barking away at some ghost. There was, thank god, a glass of wine left in the bottle from last night. The days are too long, I don’t remember the half of them, certainly not dialogue, conversations, and what have you. They jumble together and whiff away into the fogginess of my brain. It’s a disenchantment of sorts, a forgetting of life lived, a putting away into space of nothing. Black hole is better than remembering. I know nothing. I see nothing. I hear nothing. Or however that diddle goes. I am merely a body flowing through time, space and matter. The rest is all illusions gone away for the sake of my survival and for the sake of my sanity.

Bought a wine cooler yesterday with money I don’t have. I placed three bottles of wine in there. A 1999 Chambolle-Musigny by Alain Hudelot-Noellat, a 1997 Echezeaux Grand Cru by Louis Jadot, and a 1999 Gevrey-Chambertin by Louis Latour. The cooler can hold 52 bottles all together, so I've got a ways to go.

Why did I buy this appliance? The domino effect, probably. I’m a sucker for it. First, there was a bottle of 1988 Mouton-Rothschild. The bottle was at my friends' place. We were, incredibly enough, talking about wine. The subject among many other turns and derailments, landed on me saying that I’d like to own a wine cooler. I don't know why I said this. I just did. In the moment of that instant, I completely forgot how broke I am, how much money I all ready owe the bank, and imagined through the soft fuzzy butterfly effect of the Mouton, myself strolling the French country side buying futures at various chateau's. The idea popped into my head and attached itself like a leech. Such ideas, those of ownership of appliances, are very much a part of our consumerist society. In no way is this new cumbersome part of my estate necessary for my survival as a human being. Yet, for several weeks, it grew and grew until I finally bowed down to it and thought I couldn't go on with life unless I went to the store and made this purchase which will further me into financial destitution.

I don’t regret the purchase, I’m rather happy about it, however, now that the deed is done, I can clearly see that I was tricked by my own silliness. I could have saved myself a lot of money by not buying this wine cooler, and instead paid off part of my credit card bill, gone out for a beer, and drank somebody else's wine.

After the first initial conversation, I started talking about it at work . My manager said it was a great idea. My colleague said I shouldn't spend that kind of money. My manager said I should go to Home Depot, tthat they have some wine coolers on clearance sale. That bit of information was stored in the far reaches of my brain, and then promptly forgotten. My colleague surfed a few web-sites and showed me some wine stores, told me I should surf e-bay and so on. My manager said I should never buy a second hand wine cooler. I changed the conversation and we talked about the sexiness of our female customers, specially those forty something women who haven't had any face lifts or breast jobs and still look awesome.

A couple of weeks later, my colleague told me: Hey man, I was just at Home Depot, they have a 52 bottle wine cooler on clearance sale. That little bit of information was stored in the back of my brains, yet closer to home control, linking myself back into the forgotten department. Two days later, my Mouton friends at whose place this whole ordeal had started comes in and says to me: Hey Francois, I was just at Home depot where I purchased a wine cooler, you should check it out, they’re some pretty good sales going on right now.

That was the grabber. The rule of three’s. The next day I drove to Home Depot and bought a wine cooler. Now it’s sitting right behind my desk with my three lonely bottles on its racks. And me thinking, what else can I put in there? We've got 12 cases of this really good 2000 Cru Bourgeois arriving in a couple of weeks. Both my colleague and my manager are keeping a case each. Why shouldn't I do the same? Buy on credit. The American way of life!

It’s morning. Wine has been drunk. Wine has been stored. Wine all around. My ideas are foggy. My life is disappearing behind veils of red wine. I stare out the window and see the leaves on the ground which need to be raked. It’s time I got up and did something. I dream of opening a whiskey distillery. I collect single malt scotches, all ready breaking my finances to hell, and there I go again, and force myself into the wine collecting business when just a few days ago, I promised myself I’d start collecting American whiskies only. What the hell is the world coming to? I step off an airplane and kiss the ground. Barley and grapes everywhere. Fields of corn and rye stretching as far as the eyes can see. Hill sides of vineyards barely surviving on chalky grounds. Four seasons of gods and goddesses. I am the messenger of blur. Fuzzy snow on your tv screen. Embrace the harvest, embrace the moon cycle. I want to dig in the dirt with my hands, my nails breaking through the earth. I want to smell the shit which feeds the vine and the grains.

Monday, October 24, 2005

FLYING RODENTS 


(an essay without an end nor much of a middle, and a rather crappy beginning, is, i guess, probably not an essay at all...)

3h49
There’s a flying rat in my kitchen. I just got out of bed, put on a sweater for the first time in months, am feeling good like you do when you’re finally sleeping inside a blanket rather than inside a thin layer of sweat, and I’m at my kitchen sink thinking life’s not bad at all these days, singing to myself while washing a tea cup with soap and hot water. Totally unexpectedly, as one can imagine, a rat leaps out of my top cup-board and lands behind the refrigerator making a big thump noise. A good seven feet down. My mood flips instantly. First, I panic. With a tight hold on the cup and the sponge, leaving the water running, I jump about five feet backwards, thinking to myself: What The F...!!! I realize this is not the most insightful thought one might have under such a circumstance. Hey, I’m no green beret! I don’t deal well under unexpected situations. My impulse is to get the heck out, not attack back. My defensive and offensive maneuvers are a bit rusty. Are there any instructional cassette lectures one can purchase? You know, something to listen to while you’re stuck in traffic going to work. Anything along the lines of How to deal with unexpected flying rodents in your kitchen? Second, I realize what has just happened, analyze, calculate the images, the facts, the probabilities, my own sanity, whether I’m awake or not – during the actual moment when the rodent flew way too close to my face, I didn’t take the time to calculate that it was a rat, it was simply something grey, something abnormal, something to be urgently weary of and I instinctually jumped backwards – it took a few seconds more before realizing what had missed me. This is when, upon fully visualizing and understanding the flashes in my brain, that I grimace with disgust and feel all nasty inside. It’s like I’d just seen my own skeleton flash at me in sickly green neon colors while crossing a very busy Parisian intersection around Barbes on market day. Third, I shiver out of the kitchen and into my living room, feeling slimy. I consider blocking off the kitchen and never using it again. Fourth, I slip my sandals on, and decide that building a wall between my kitchen and the rest of the house is not a viable option. How do I afford the bricks, the mortar, the time, and the energy? Fifth, I bravely make it back into my kitchen, fists up, ready to defend myself against any more flying rodents. It’s like a b-rated horror film taking place live right here in my kitchen. I hope Sigourney Weaver plays the female lead, because I think she’s hot, and she’s good in those kinds of pictures. Specially when she shaves her head.

I make myself a much deserved cup of tea.

***

Did I mention that I’m scared of rats? It’s not like some insurmountable phobia where I freeze up and I can’t deal with life anymore, it’s just that I’d rather not be around them at all if I can help it. Sure, sure, little white mice are cute to look at with their pink noses and such... but rats? No way, man. And mice, as far as I’m concerned, are just fine for pet snakes’ snacks – that’s a tongue twister – though I do think differently about mice now that I’ve read the complete series to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a couple weeks back.

10h21
This post is going nowhere. What is my theme? What am I talking about? Am I getting anywhere? There’s definitely a beginning, but is there a middle and an end, or at least one or the other? Nothing. Just fluff. I’m at a dead end hitting an inexistent brick wall full of rats gnawing holes through the centuries one generation at a time.

***

Brutus, my hundred pound chocolate Labrador, is useless as far as the rat situation is concerned. He simply can’t be bothered about it. He is after all supposed to be a retriever, not a hunter. I understand, but still...

The rat situation started a few weeks ago, and so far, I’m loosing. It became widely evident when one evening I was lying on my couch watching television. Brutus is lying on the floor right next to me, waiting for food to accidentally fall to the floor, when out of the corner of my left eye I notice something moving. I turn my head from Seinfeld to the left where on good days the kitchen usually sits, and see right in the middle of the brightly lit linoleum floor, a grey rat chewing on something. I can’t believe the audacity. I respect the rodent for a fraction of a second. Our eyes meet. He doesn’t move, he barely stops chewing for a moment. Then I look at Brutus, who’s completely given up on getting any more food from me that evening. His head is relaxed on his front legs while he’s looking straight at the rat with a totally bored, please don’t bother me right now look in his eyes. I nudge him a little, to no avail. I have to get up and pound the floor a couple of times before the rat actually decides to get the hell out of dodge. There was no more denying the problem. I bought some rat poison, placed it where the rat should get to them and where Brutus couldn’t however hard he tried. I found the little hole in the wall next to the refrigerator where I saw the rat make his get-away. A few days later I started smelling decaying flesh, and figured I’d had him. But then the smell stopped way too fast. And then came this morning. The smell going away was good. The smell going away so quickly brings me to assume there’s something else under my house eating the decaying bodies of dead rodents. That usually means more rodents. Rodents are like humans, they use the death and misery of their comrades to build and strengthen themselves. It’s a very affective, efficient, and smart policy, if you can stomach it.

***

How does a rodent get into the highest cup-board of my kitchen? That’s where I keep the coffee machine, the grinder, and all the other coffee accessories which I haven’t used since August 4th. That’s also where I keep absolutely no food of any kind. It makes no sense. I have to get rid of this problem. I can hear them at night in the attic running around on top of my head, or underneath the house scrounging around, there’s got to be a whole infestation. And what scares me the most, is that I could have been standing two feet to my right, lets say, reaching for something in one of those cup-boards, and that rat would have been flying right into my head.

I can picture myself fighting with a rat straddling my face, clawing at my eyes and getting tangled up in my hair. I’d be screaming murder through the house, and finally ripping the rat off my scalp and slamming it down on my driveway’s hard pavement cement. This is neither here nor there, but once when I was thirteen years old and a freshman in high school, a squirrel got cornered in the school in between two flights of stairs on the midway landing where a window had been left open. Several kids surrounded the creature and blocked it in a corner. They were throwing all kinds of things at it: spit balls, pens, books, bags, trying to kick at it and such... keeping as safe a distance from it without letting it get out of the circle. The squirrel was scared out of its wits. I broke through the circle with bravado, to show off to the other kids really though rationalizing to myself that I was trying to save the poor thing from their cruelties, that I was some kind of hero. I walked right into the group towards the squirrel and grabbed it. Right as I was going to put it back out onto the window ledge it had fallen from, the little shit bit me. It hurt like hell. Before I realized what I was doing, I slammed the thing on the tile floor of the hallway. The other kids backed away in awe, and I felt like a dip-shit.

Basically, what I’m trying to say, is that I’ve had my dealings with rodents. And I would like to be through with them if at all possible. They haunt my dreams.

13h10
Imagine being in bed, thinking you’re awake but not able to move a single limb and other than this slight dysfunction of motor skills, all is more or less normal. That is, you’re seeing the room around you and it seems fine. Then, everything shifts a bit. Not by much. Not wacky enough to reassure you this is only a dream. Just funky enough to warn you that something’s drastically wrong. The door’s a little bit taller, the angles are smaller or wider than usual, the light is of a slightly different tune, the floor creaks in a different tone, the perspectives are not quite right, like those of a beginner in art class, and your bed is facing the wrong way... et cetera. It’s a mixture between hallucinating and dreaming, if the two aren’t the same to begin with. All the sudden, a whole school of rats comes racing into the room from nowhere in particular, from the door, and carpets right over your body at high speed. It’s like a heard of tiny wild buffalos. Thousands and thousands of tiny feet running on your back and disappearing on the other side into the wall or through the window you’re not sure. The whole experience lasting no more than one minute. Can you imagine how that feels? It doesn’t feel good. And flying rats in my kitchen only reiterates my fear of them. Every rat I see is like a bad omen warning me the plague is on its way. Maybe the plague will start right here in my house. Should never have read Camus! They’re breeding themselves into an army down underneath my humble habitation, taking control of the walls, the attic, and slowly coming into my kitchen, until finally, they will flow out like a sea of gangrene overtaking my body before going into the rest of the city and spreading to every corner and every house they can get their teeth into. I better put a stop to this right away. I’m the hero on a mission to save the planet! Kill all the rats in and around my house! (This is really starting to sound like a B-rated flick. Anybody want to write the screenplay? Nobody in the neighborhood believes me, other than the lead lady of course who lost her whole family to the rats as they were visiting, and we have to go about it alone, until it becomes too late, the rats have all ready eaten half the population of the city, we’ve fallen in love, when finally we discover the hiding place of their leader: Twinkle Twinkle, the Grand Master Rat!) Anyway, I don’t want them getting all cozy and stuff in there with me footing the heating bill this winter!

22h49
Can I go to sleep in a house full of rats?

Monday, October 17, 2005

RE-BIRTH AND BREATHING 


A Re-birth! That’s a bit melodramatic. Not sure if that’s not exaggerating things just a tad bit. Everything in motion, everything moving in and out of brain death, doesn’t spell out a new birth, and definitely not a re-birth... how ridiculous is that? Haven’t been able to breath all week. Allergies. I have not gone to see a doctor to confirm this self imposed hypothesis on my current health. I don’t feel sick, it’s just I can’t breath. I blow my nose and thin see-through mucus comes out. To no avail, since I still can’t breath. Great for wine tasting... Yeah! I’ve done a few recently. The blockage happens mostly in the morning upon waking up, it seems to clear up as the day takes its course, so it’s not so bad. This morning around 5h30, I walked outside and sneezed for about fifteen minutes. That seemed to only steer things up in there. Now, just about one hour later – what have I accomplished during this hour? Not much. I’ve managed to make some tea, to slip into a pair of dirty blue jeans, and put on a shirt I found in the creases of my couch – Just about one hour later, as I was saying, I’m at my desk sipping some Yorkshire tea and trying real hard to forget all about my nose, my inability to smell anything properly, and all that slime I’m having nightmares about: Where does it all come from? Is it my brain I’m blowing out through my nostrils, and if it is, shouldn’t it have a little more color to it? Somewhere, I’ve either heard or read that what you see in your blow rag, if it’s clear and you can see through it, then you’re experiencing allergic reactions to... not sure what to... Mold? Pollen? Whatever’s floating unseen through the air we breath... But when and if it starts turning white, creamy, and eventually greenish, then that’s when you should worry, and start drawing out your last will and testament.

This woman came into the store the other day. She had tubes coming out of her nose, linking her face to a hand-bag she carried about her shoulder from which emanated little beeps and burps. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet and a couple of inches tall. I was at the register cashing in a sale from this other woman who comes in every other day to buy a fifth of overpriced rum in a plastic container. Every other day she stands in front of the rum section and has to make a decision: Clear or Gold? And sure enough, it’s always one or the other. Anyway, I was giving her her change back when the other woman was walking into the store. The one who’d just bought the rum walked out, she’s a very tall and very skinny woman around forty something, and just as she’s stepping outside, the two women recognized each other.

“Bernadette!” screams the very tall very skinny woman, “How are you? I barely recognized you! it’s so Good to see you! Wow, we were all sooo worried... how are you?”
“I’m doing wonderful! It’s so good to see you too.”
“What happened?”
“Ohhh, wow, you know... it... I got real sick, and... I was in the hospital... you see, both my lungs collapsed. First the left one went, then the other one just afterwards...”
“Oh my gosh, are you all right now?”
“Oh yeah, I’m fine. I don’t move as fast as the rest of you, but I’m doing great now. It’s amazing, you know, it started out as a cold. Just a stupid little cold, you know, sniffling and stuff, then it moved down to my throat and it started getting real bad, a strip throat and all... and before you know it, my lungs collapsed.”
“Oh wow, I’m soooo sorry, but it’s sooo good to see you again.”
“It’s good to be back.”
“All right, well... you take care.”
“You too.”

(The conversation lasted a bit longer than that. I don’t mean to make it sound trite. They talked about seeing each other again, absolutely needing to go out and do some catching up, see some other people in common, have a couple of drinks, and a lot more of how good it was to see each other again.)

The tiny woman bought a cold bottle of inexpensive chardonnay, paid, left, and that was that.

***

Re-birth! Ah! Re-birth, my ass... I’m starting to sound like a born-again bible-thumper, talking about being born again, about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, coming out from the depth of SIN... buddy, oh boy! Birthing myself through a long never-ending air-conditioning ventilation system made up of organic material all slushy and flesh like, crawling in there head first, being thrusted out by unknown unseen and probably misunderstood forces of nature, pulling myself out or trying, clinging on to anything... nothing I grab onto stays in my grasp, like trying to climb a mountain made up of green gobs of slime... except I’m not climbing, I’m neither going up or down, I have lost all sense of gravity, I am not doing anything intentionally, I am being evacuated, pushed out, shoved away from wherever I was before... covered in slime and gooey stuff... I have lost control... re-birth... My Ass! More like an execration! Moving then not moving, thrusted forward then sucked back in, thrusted forward, then sucked back into the darkness, seeing the dot of light getting bigger and then small again, but every time it gets bigger, it’s just a little bigger than it was the last thrust, and every time it gets small again, it’s just a little less small than it was the time before... an unimaginable spot of brilliance amongst all this darkness and fish entrails never quite in the same spot, moving about – THRUSH – another blow from the depths thrusting me a good ten yards forward sliding right through the sludge of water and blood, this needing to get this ordeal over with, this needing a breath of fresh air – here I go again, whining about breathing... breathing, that’s the central theme of this post: Looking for a breath of Fresh Air! THRUSH... and off I go whooshing about like a turtle caught in a mudslide... the spot of light getting larger, itself breathing as if alive, not just an exit, but an orifice, a large cave opening alive and breathing... just one more little push and... and... AND THEN!!!

PLOUF! FLUSH...

(Born again, my ass. Re-birth, my ass. I’m merely trying not to go brain dead just yet.)

Monday, October 10, 2005

I’M STILL HERE 


Well, here I am at the coffee shop, and this is my time to write here on my blog, though I find that I have very little to say. I should have written something prior to coming here, but I didn’t. What I’ve been doing all week with all this new found time on my hands is read books! Write on my long-hand journal! Work in my garden! Work on my screenplay! It’s been amazing.

So... sorry... I have nothing to say.

I need to get used to this new found freedom. I will try to publish on my blog once a week. I will post either on Sunday or on Monday. This will start as soon as I get off my ass and write something worthy of being posted. Hopefully, and unlike today, I will have something ready before coming to the coffee shop.

So, please forgive me for not posting, and please believe me when I say that I will post again soon. To the few of you who do – or did – read this blog, please try and see this as a kind of re-birth.

Cheers.

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