Whatever He Says
It's not that he was interested in other people's converstations but he couldn't help but overhear them, and the cadence alone was enough to distract him verily.
Sometimes, in crowded restaurants, after he had eaten and was sated, he would start hearing all of it at once, and although this was not always unpleasant, on occasion it gave him the feeling that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He tried music when at home and other occupants of the dwelling--he often wasn't sure how he was related to some of them--were on the phone, but if the music played too loud it also distracted him, and so the Velvet Underground, and his ex-girlfriend's phone coversation, and then that neighborhood girl who had called his name out at the top of her lungs so he would let her in, and her phone conversation, and then Lou Reed who was just waiting on his man--uptown, for heroin, he's not fooling anyone around here--but all of it became not just too much but too complex for him too consider, and so he would reach out towards a simpler unknown, and then...
He woke up in the church of his youth. The pastor was a communist, or so many of the congregation thought, what with his sermons including the thoughts of Kant and Kierkegaard. He had pale blues eyes, the pastor did.
He liked the pastor, so unlike the used-car salesman type of pastor he knew from other daydreams. The pastor once compared him to the founder of the Methodist religion. He took it as a compliment.
Then he was leaving the church, pausing purposefully in the hallway that smelled of old age, death, and coffee. She interrupted his nothingness to say, "penny for your thoughts," and he blushed verily, for he had been thinking about bonking this woman's daughter, up on the alter, in front of the entire congregation, except they (the congregation) would be frozen in time, and he and the woman's daughter would be melting, were melting, had melted.
He stepped outside into blistering silence.
|
It's not that he was interested in other people's converstations but he couldn't help but overhear them, and the cadence alone was enough to distract him verily.
Sometimes, in crowded restaurants, after he had eaten and was sated, he would start hearing all of it at once, and although this was not always unpleasant, on occasion it gave him the feeling that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He tried music when at home and other occupants of the dwelling--he often wasn't sure how he was related to some of them--were on the phone, but if the music played too loud it also distracted him, and so the Velvet Underground, and his ex-girlfriend's phone coversation, and then that neighborhood girl who had called his name out at the top of her lungs so he would let her in, and her phone conversation, and then Lou Reed who was just waiting on his man--uptown, for heroin, he's not fooling anyone around here--but all of it became not just too much but too complex for him too consider, and so he would reach out towards a simpler unknown, and then...
He woke up in the church of his youth. The pastor was a communist, or so many of the congregation thought, what with his sermons including the thoughts of Kant and Kierkegaard. He had pale blues eyes, the pastor did.
He liked the pastor, so unlike the used-car salesman type of pastor he knew from other daydreams. The pastor once compared him to the founder of the Methodist religion. He took it as a compliment.
Then he was leaving the church, pausing purposefully in the hallway that smelled of old age, death, and coffee. She interrupted his nothingness to say, "penny for your thoughts," and he blushed verily, for he had been thinking about bonking this woman's daughter, up on the alter, in front of the entire congregation, except they (the congregation) would be frozen in time, and he and the woman's daughter would be melting, were melting, had melted.
He stepped outside into blistering silence.
- jimlouis 11-26-2000 2:39 pm