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Kittens And Squirrels
He was reading the comic Russian novel, Oblomov, in bed, while waiting for her to return from a rock and roll sponsored political meeting. He didn't necessarily find anything laugh out loud funny about a guy who doesn't ever get out of bed but he was thoroughly enjoying the phrasing (even if much of what he liked might be attributed to the translator), and he was in that good space that the well written novel will take you.
He could not help the wandering of his mind which had him speculating if she was at that moment interacting with her ex-boyfriend who was heading up the politcal meeting. Everyone should have their fun was a thing he tried to convince himself of and politics can be fun. Not that this wasn't a serious meeting, because it was, very serious, and during a time in history when when politcal meetings should be taken seriously. But still, in between each scenario which had Oblomov turning down one social invitation after another, he wondered if maybe he himself shouldn't try to be more social.
She came back, not at all too late, but with that level of intoxication that results from meaningful social interaction, and he put his book down, knowing he would not be picking it up again this night.
He didn't want to go out for drinks with people from the meeting to the place that had once overcharged him for a cheeseburger but suggested that she feel free and she responded that she did feel free and would stay in with him. He put Oblomov on the nightstand.
He knew that at this particular point in time if he were an item on the drive-thru menu at a fast food restaurant, she would not order him. He could be, and had been in the past, a really juicy item but he didn't feel that way this evening. And he was beginning to worry about the sequential frequency of his less than upbeat demeanor.
She suggested they tell each other stories and he suggested she bring the two of them a slug of hard liquor. She told her story while they drank and he hoped providence would allow for him to not to tell his. Her story was whimsical and funny and somewhat postmodern and he rooted her on as one of the squirrels in her story burst into flames. He didn't like squirrels and this she knew.
They laughed together even as he plotted the best way not to tell his story and finally when it came time for him he just threw out a crappy, loosely slung together tale that was derivative of hers, with squirrels that have no sense of family even as they lived together on a country estate but none of that matters because as soon as he could phrase it he had them, the squirrels, each obliterated by meteors. The last sentence of his tale was a fragment and she booed him for it.
They talked about other things, under the covers, and he mentioned a news story from the town in which he used to live. A man had been arrested for killing two kittens, there had been a 500 dollar reward for information leading to his arrest, and that was all he could remember. She did not want to be so predictable as to always root against the kitten killer so she suggested extenuating circumstances that may have accounted for the murdering of two kittens.
She was getting sleepy but he had become wide awake, thinking about kitten killers. He had a true story he wanted to tell (he later lied that he had made it up) about a three-year-old boy in a southern town with hundreds (let's hope its only hundreds) of boys just like him, and how the boy had been sytematically torturing a kitten all day and then how he, the man, and his girlfriend (although she mostly hated him by then), had rescued the kitten and cared for it a couple of days, trying not to look too closely at the left eyeball which practically hung from its socket.
The kitten died at the vet but before it died the girlfriend had seen the little boy on the street and the boy asked after the kitten. She explained very gently, but honestly, to the point, that the kitten was very sick, that he, the boy, had almost killed it and that it might very well die. The three-year-old boy in the southern town with we hope only hundreds like him, said--"can I have him back after he dead?"
He was laughing sort of maniacally, or hysterically, when he delivered that punch line. She had, afterall, asked for a story. He was full of them like that.
In the morning she woke up crying, said she had been haunted in her dreams all night. Could not in fact tell when she was dreaming or when she was awake, just feeling bad. That's when he told her he had made it up, and was sorry for making it up.
The Skull Preceding Winter
These sequential days of cold, damp and drizzling make a person want to cry out in angst about how hopelessly winterlike it is getting as that person--clue, its me--gets ready for his first real winterlike climate in twenty years or so.
I lived for ten years but not anymore in New Orleans--I'm east coast--and in New Orleans you didn't really think about winter except on those two really cold days every year. Sometimes you would think about winter after it was already in the past and think how that wasn't much of a winter, if indeed you could even remember what winter was like in places that have real winters.
People talk about early snow this year and I have pinned one predictor down to--by mid November there will be a first snow.
You ever heard that Gil Scott-Heron tune, Winter in America?
I washed the dishes in my sink yesterday. They were props of domesticity. Some were dirty and some were clean. There was some mold. There was a little sludge-water in the bottom of some glasses. They had been acting as props for what is very possibly three months. But as a baby step towards genuine domestic behavior I went ahead and cleaned them up and put them away, yesterday.
I am still holding on to a few elements of suspect behavior regarding the idea of a man taking care of his business. I suspect the doing of those dishes (and the unpacking of some dishes that were wrapped in paper sitting in 30 gallon trash bags in the garage) was an act of self-prodding, which is different, more constructive, than self-flaggelation, and that other one, self-deprecation.
I'm just sitting here, off the clock, doing nothing really, as a caretaker, which is my current station in life (being a caretaker). Being a caretaker is complicated and takes careful consideration. I consider things on my own time though. I don't charge for it. No one could really afford me if I did.
I was in a used bookstore yesterday that priced its books as things of value themselves. Like first editions, even of common crap, were more expensive than reprintings. I bought a used paperback for five dollars even though that is approximately ten times what I would generally spend on a used book. I had touched the novelty skull on the wall and set it off screeching or laughing for a period of time that would be my best example of an interminable length, and as much as anything that was why I spent five dollars at the bookstore. I was being penitent more than I was being supportive of a local bookseller.