Timbre/Semblance
Usually, I am getting up to pee several times during the course of my sleep. Tonight it was just the opposite. It was water that I couldn’t stop drinking. I would walk down to the kitchen, toss off a glass and go back to my bed, only to realize that my mouth was so draught, that the few moments respite would elapse almost the instant my head would hit the pillow and I would repeat the process all over again. I must have drank at least a whole gallon this way . . . Backward and forward, awake and asleep. Finally, I decide to just get behind the damn machine and start writing. Which brings me here:
Earlier, Scott knocks on my door saying that he wants to share a smoke with me. O.K. We go into my garage and I allow him to tell me all about his first week at his new job. I had grown so accustom to his unemployment, that a part of me believed it was going to be endless for him. He viewed a training video of the instructor crashing a company vehicle. “Do not be like me,” she addresses the class. I give him two weeks. Tops.
Shiro Kuramata: Laputa Bed (1991)
I go back inside to get some work done on this website. Distractedly, I had just watched a video on the topic of the 4 Common Money Mistakes Keeping Me Poor. So many vlogs that appear on the homepage of YouTube are like this now. The tenor, tone, and timbre of which, all semblant of the ones that have come before, trying to persuade the viewer (ME!) that they are living their lives in error. Not to worry. I know that one day I will be a millionaire. I can feel I am getting close.
Suddenly, another knock from the door downstairs and sure enough it is Scott. “My girlfriend just broke up with me”, he says, and that she is packing up her life next door into boxes and wouldn’t I like to head down to the pub with him for a couple of drinks? I grab for us two umbrellas and we head off into the drizzle at once. We share a flask of cognac and polish it off before we are even at the end of the block. I remember thinking how rare the occurrence of having a slate this clean all at once must have felt for him. A featureless mind, clear as a bell. Everything but the girl. “Just the way God intended” he says. I give him two weeks. Tops.
We have four more glasses of Courvoisier at the pub before we decide to go back to our flat to see if she had finished gathering her things. “She’s gone alright,” he says as we enter into his apartment. “In fact, seems to me she took some of my stuff too.”
We enjoy a meal together of salmon with sweet potatoes and chili crisp over rice. I tell Scott that I am right next door if he ever needs anything and put a stamp on the evening after we had finished the rest of the tiramisu that was leftover from my birthday. I headed home, undressed and slunk into my bed feeling like I was floating on a barque. I sensed that I must have been on the brink of sleep for hours, when in reality I was just lying there, endlessly sailing towards dreamworld, a castaway amongst my own mattress. I could see it (dreamworld), there in the distance, almost able to fully close in on it, to reach out and to grab it, yet was never quite able to set foot onto the shore. It was all a mirage. Paralyzed, alone along the sideways seaways of mind, surrounded by water with nothing to drink, tossing and turning, lost at sea . . .