Like the slight sweetness of the vapor a movie theater popcorn machine produces only in the few seconds before heat forces the seeds inside out, which makes me list to one side and stare upward like I’m drunk in front of the stereo at a party, or the Andromeda flowers the air is made of at three or four in the morning in February though they can’t possibly have bloomed yet; the taste of your mouth wasn’t worth describing, and I know all the movie theaters and Andromeda trees and descriptions of things exist only as part of that mouth I went to again and again before I learned to read at home alone.
Your not-too orderly hair under the overhead lights at a Tully’s Coffee made me feel an ache similar to getting out of the bath when I have a very high fever. It wasn’t just that reflected in a fake marble tabletop my own hair looked mythological by comparison, but that I suddenly knew it was finite but too massive to really imagine. As we pulled our paper napkins out of the dispenser I wished I could rip my head off and shoot a superior napkin dispenser out of my chest cavity.
“If I’m an ass, I should say so. If I don’t, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.”
(via henrycharlesbukowski)
It’s okay that I’m filled with terror whenever I’m not buying shoes, because I saw a black-and-white picture of a man in a very old magazine, and the caption said he was filled with terror whenever he wasn’t buying shoes. I like to imagine he was a famous prostitute with the power to shrink until he was nearly invisible, but I’m glad it doesn’t say that in the caption, because if anything about him was certain except that he shared my terror, he would lose his ability to drag it away from a specificity that is even worse.
I had a physics professor who talked about “Finnegan’s Wake,” and the difficulty of translating intentionally nonsensical passages into other languages. He was comparing language to DNA. I was identifying styles of domestic architecture, I was shrinking in the drier, I was behaving like a wave and a particle, I was regenerating limbs, I was reapplying lipstick, I was there, using you as human pantyhose, and then gone, climbing out the window while you slept to buy chips from a gas station. I was realizing that the only nonsense translatable into any language is I was there and then I was gone.