Assembled the night before, no doubt. Between ten and twenty slides all neatly formatted. The first slide says the same thing. “You Will Be Attacked Today”. There is an alarm that goes with it, "You......are under.....Attack!" The subsequent slides are a series of illustrations depicting a man being physically assaulted in one way or another. Many of them are bizarre enough to be quite humorous. A man having, what appears to be, a gallon of milk poured over his head in a supermarket. Sitting on a park bench while a small child stands behind wielding a piece of lumber. A group of people hovered over him in a restaurant while one attempts CPR. Bloodthirsty pandas. Bombs.
I pull up my email. There isn’t much. The usual cast of characters. I start to reply to what I can but the motivation is quickly sapped from my fingertips. I often find myself stalled in midsentence, distracting myself with taking out the garbage or opening a window. Questions layered like onions. “How have you been?” “What time is it?” “Are you still in your pajamas.” Each query, by itself, simple enough to satisfy. “Good.” “11:30” “Yes.”
Then I start with the Boolean logic. I “and” them together and type, “Fuck you.” I delete the “Fuck you” and reassemble them with “or’s”. Now we’re headed to trouble town. It’s very difficult to tell which is most important. What carries more weight? “How have I been?” Like on a sliding scale? Or like “sheep go to heaven and goats go to hell”? And time? I’ve always suspected the rotation of the earth to be completely unreliable. I feel good but I know there are cells dying in me. Falling away building piles of dust in my bed and on the floor. I breathe them in and infect the rest. “I wear pajamas because they are comfortable. I never had a pair when I was a kid. I want to wear them all day.”
I go back to the slides. See if there isn’t one that I can live with. Every morning.
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