The missionaries kicked in my door and held their guns in my face and said, while I sniffed gun oil and cordite, DOESN’T IT GET U DOWN THAT U HAVE EXISTENTIAL CRISES AMONG DOPES WITH BETTER CAREERS THAN U OR THAT U REACH OVER ON UR DRIVE INTO WORK WITH UR PHANTOM ARM AND PAT HER PHANTOM LEG AND WONDER DO U FEEL THAT WHEREVER U ARE AND THINK BOY I MISS U KID, FULL OF WIST?
And I say, right before they knock in my teeth and I spit them like cherry chiclets onto the tile floor of our entryway, well you know, it’s not all bad. There is the way the lane behind me fades into the grey of the falling snow until it vanishes and there are the ninety or ninety-five greys of the sky and there is the little whirring sound the coffee machine at the UN briefly makes when it’s finished with my coffee order and it’s time to take out the cup, like the propellor of a toy motorboat spinning when you lift it out of the water, or imagining on my way home late at night from work and stopping by the music school to try out a new cello how Gamma will look asleep in my bed by the light of the lava lamp (knowing her mom is not home and she’ll use the situation to sleep in the big bed) and I get home and she’s really sleeping there and she really looks exactly the way I imagined and the stopping by the music school late at night: having my own key, wandering the halls of an old thick-walled convent in the pitch dark thinking about centuries of ghosts as I feel my way to the cello room and turn on the light and boy does the C string sound good on this new cello (although it looks a little dopey and I won’t buy it I don’t think)! So, I tell the missionaries, there are various phenomena limiting how down it can get me, now take your corny booklets and go bug someone else.
Got a flaming heart can’t get my fill
Posted in Metamorphosism
missionaries are not to be trusted under any circumstances. you with your gray skies and your lava lamp and your ghost nuns should know this. get a reinforced door and take street fighting classes.
You make me miss her, too. I’ve noticed that dopes tend to have better careers. there is some kind of force of attraction that drives mediocrity toward the word ‘career’, I tell myself. On the other hand, I also self-soothe that there is no such thing as ‘career': it’s just event after event, drop by drop, wist by whir by reverberating string, right?
Right, unless you’re sitting in a roomful of people of whom at least 80% are diplomats, of whom at least 60% are bright, and driven, etc etc.
OTOH, who knows how many of them are happy. Or whether I’d trade with any of them. AND I saw a guy in the lobby with a bad toupee, which ALWAYS makes me feel loads better, or at least superior. Not that there’s any such thing as a good toupee. There is either the bad toupee you notice, or you think it’s hair I suppose.
And today some guy touched me and said, You look like movie star. And I’m all like, maybe I’m having a good hair day. And then I think, what, who, Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou? And the waiter at the Chinese restaurant was nice to me. So things looked up today.
yeah, there’s this thing I once heard about a yoga teacher telling a student: Remember when you find yourself envying someone else in the class—you can’t just have her thighs; you’d have to take her whole life with them.
Especially over the last year as I was drowning in merde, I sometimes found myself thinking that if I ever did get to trade with anyone, I’d likely end up the gainer. But man, as far as I’m concerned, really it’s far worse than Pascal’s bet. Me, at least, I know I can sometimes handle.
And I’m guessing you *totally* look like a movie star every.fucking.day. The hott kind.