Without joy, mild merriment sure but no joy no redemption. I hate those kinds of weekends where newspapers keep time and coffee making keeps time and the socks just stay wherever you put them and people come and go and open their pipes and pour words out. I might watch them make puddles on the ground and walk around wishing for some other course of action or maybe I'll pour a puddle of my own half-hoping somebody steps in it and feels a cold rush in one foot, maybe looks up or around or behind or down or asks "What is this doing here?".
Obviously I am a sucklord
I've been spending a fair amount of time with a friend lately and mostly it is quite enjoyable but this weekend it dawned on me that he might have got me all wrong. It feels like he has decided which boxes I tick on a list, writer, not stupid, careless with fashion, rebellious in some ways, good listener, but that is all.
It feels like a major failure of communication on my part. How can it be that someone I spend so much time with doesn't know who I am? I know quite a few things about him, intimate things, broad things, daily habit things, but this knowledge is not reciprocated because he never asks and I don't offer. Ordinarily I am a font of information, about myself, but with him I don't ever feel the urge to tell, only the urge to listen and observe.
On reflection the failure feels more fundamental than just a lapse in communication. It feels like I let myself become unimportant in his presence, overwhelmed by the oddness of wanting to listen and listen and not speak in return. Obviously I am some kind of sucklord.
Horrible horrible horrible
My pancreas, or similar organ located in middle of self, feels odd due to beer or similar. It seems clear, to me right now, that I am drunk and this is probably the main reason for feeling like shit. The other contenders in the "reasons for feeling like shit contest" are as follows:
No. Not going to make list of reasons, that is shit idea. Better idea take shoes off.
A new kind of sponge
I can't stop listening. From the moment I leave the house in the morning until I come home in the afternoon, and sometimes again after that in the evening. It's not music. I've gone off music. These are words. Podcasts and audiobooks. Interviews and recordings of long dead poets, children's books, even American radio programs, anything I can get my hands on.
I think I've become a new kind of sponge. I haven't been this excited about anything since I learned to read my own bedtime story, all by myself, and spent the next ten years reading every book* in the house, even the dictionaries. I remember my mother looking horrified when she came in to tell me to turn off the light and there I was, propped up in bed, reading my Junior Macquarie Dictionary like it was a story. She asked me what I was doing and I replied "reading the dictionary". She left it at that and didn't mention it again until years later, when she used it as an example of my excessive reading habits. I think this is a good example of my mother's storytelling habits. Maybe I'll make a podcast about it...
*It might have taken longer to read all the books in the house, there were so many and new ones kept appearing all the time.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if I'm lying or if isolating only one corner of a thought gives a solidly incorrect impression
There is an elderly couple I greet on the street from time to time. I wave or nod or say hello as I walk by them because they are always stationary. She sits in an old plastic chair and he either stands near her or props himself against a tree or a fence or a building. I see them in the same general area but not usually in precisely the same place. I have never seen them walking either to or from their spot. They vary their placement, either sun or shade, depending on the weather.
They speak with thick accents and appear shrivelled and worn like elderly like The Potato Eaters but with less hats. This afternoon on the way home from work the woman asked me a question, she has never done this before. Our conversation was small and stilted but it has left me thinking. Here's the conversation as I remember it:
Woman: Work?
DS: Yes, I am coming home now.
Woman: Work?
DS: Yes. Work.
Woman: Factory?
DS: No. University.
Woman: Good job.
I waved farewell and kept on walking. Factory? I don't know anyone that works in a factory. I don't even know where the nearest factory would be. Alexandria? Mascot? Somewhere out West a little? The first thing I think of when someone says factory is warehouse apartment, or party, or sad, dark and looming space with holes in the roof and rain leaking in. I don't think 'work'.
I wonder what she thinks I do at the university? Maybe she thinks I am a secretary, that I have a big wooden desk and a typewriter. I hope that is what she thinks I do. She would never have guessed my actual job.*
I was friendly to the woman as she spoke with me, smiled at her, genuinely wished her a pleasant afternoon soaking up the sun but I still felt a little guilty as I walked away. I felt like my life should have rushed into sharp focus and perspective, that I should have immediately felt some stark difference between what might have been her working life in a factory and mine which has exactly nothing to do with factories, but I didn't. I felt nothing of the sort, nothing but mildly interrupted because I had to fish out my phone and rewind the podcast I was listening to so I didn't miss anything. But then fresh guilt emerged at my lack of perspective and the huge black hole where I should have been thinking about the woman's life instead of my own.
This sense of guilt has persisted, through the end of the podcast, three rounds of Drawsome, one wee break and the eating of one spoon of peanut butter directly from the jar. Why don't I feel a sense of perspective? Could it be that I have become so fixated on the inner workings of my mind and my life that I am no longer able to be changed by a small chance encounter on a street corner?
I hope so.
I would like nothing more than to be largely unchanged by the world as it bumps into me, like a character from a Woody Allen film. I have always wanted to be like a character from a Woody Allen film who goes through something big, like a failed romance, and comes out the other end just exactly as they were before, maybe more so. Maybe they use the experience to write a book or a play but manage to avoid any personal growth or change. I admire those characters, how they distil themselves into becoming an even more interesting and dense version of who they were to begin with.
And so now the guilt is changing into hope. The sun is still out and the couple is still likely to be sat, weirdly without any cups of tea, in their afternoon spot, unmoving, not talking, just taking in the day. I have half a mind to go back there and talk to them about this, ask them what they think it means but I won't because that's closer to crazy than I want to go this afternoon so for now I'll go and make a cup of tea and think about something else.
*Not just the woman might have a hard time guessing but everybody, there is an extra layer of trickiness in that I am not employed by the university but that my employer has free and exclusive use of a building on campus.
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