Woke up to an overcast morning. Jeffrey asks me if the sun will ever come back. I tell him it won’t, that the world is ending. I think I’m joking, and then for a minute I don’t. It doesn’t matter. Whether or not I’m joking, or whether or not the world is ending, the impulse to consider any of it feels contrived.
This city is looking right at me. Glass facades and middle-management assholes are penetrating my already shattered self-image. I am not like the man, who upon mounting the bus, sets his briefcase on his lap and removes his gloves, flicks open a gold-plated latch and pulls out a manilla folder full of paperwork, and paints for himself in red pen an image of self-worth. I do not detect in the world enough space for sense or for logic; deciding upon meaning before the dust from an agitated image settles. With so little to say, everything becomes a liability and redundancy its symptom. Like a pilot flying his first plane, every announcement is charged with a kind of tyrannical freneticism; he believes that he knows how to fly the plane, or at least believes in his belief of how a plane is properly flown, and we trust his judgement, or trust our beliefs about his judgement. The uniform is more of a charm that presses upon our belief than it is a dignifying symbol. The plane could have crashed despite all of our judgements, and to whom then does belief belong?
Last week, I ate a filet mignon in the park and cried when it wasn’t tender enough to cut with a spoon. In France, the meat was tender enough to cut with a spoon. Maybe it was the season and I was under the influence of tender meat and local wine, but I remember my spoon melting the meat like it was butter and my solitude eclipsing all beliefs about respect.
An astrologer told me that there are plots of deciduous tress growing and shedding in my heart. I paid her $50 for the hour, but told her that I could find everything she had told me on Instagram. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” she told me. I was just as surprised as I was unsurprised by her response. The character of her voice shifted and I notice it in mine now too. The influence of all things exacerbated by our willingness to be the influenced. Perhaps it’s not a pathology as much as it is a condition. Either way, the constant recycling is too cyclical and when you revisit every point with the knowledge of the rest, you invite disaster; we were not given a pros and cons list when we decidedly shifted away from linearity.
In front of me, there is a ball of the absent coalescing into the present, and I entertain the idea of kicking it. Everything has moved to the foreground, to the plane before the horizon, but I am too ill-equipped to discern it's contours. I was always under the impression that I was ahead of the curve. I rejected the idea of the curve a few years ago, and when I reintroduced it back into my life, I realized that I was steadily behind it.
Last week, I ate a filet mignon in the park and cried when it wasn’t tender enough to cut with a spoon. In France, the meat was tender enough to cut with a spoon. Maybe it was the season and I was under the influence of tender meat and local wine, but I remember my spoon melting the meat like it was butter and my solitude eclipsing all beliefs about respect. At this time, I had relinquished respect in search for something more pure. I had relinquished respect for tender meat that I could cut with a spoon and crisp Autumn mornings that I had told myself would be transformative by the sheer fact of their being. The mornings were often more cold than they were crisp and time passed like a blanket being slowly pulled off your body. Between morning and night the days happened upon me as if they were some sanctimonious occurrence, to which I responded somewhat irreverently by sleeping through the afternoons. In short, time is always the assassin of belief.
still thinking about a spoonful of tender filet mignon..