Before leaving to visit me, my father turned down the temperature of the fridge to better ensure the preservation of food. Upon returning home, my mother discovered a jar filled with borscht had exploded in the fridge from the cold pressure. “Can you imagine?” she said. “It was like a blood bank fridge.” Then she went on to give advice about “safety precautions: first!” To which I agreed—be aware, you know, if you really are too drunk to be listening to Elgar and Tchaikovsky at the inner harbour after dark, be aware, you know, that you’re swaying from Pilsner since four in the afternoon and are kinda sorta bummed at not going to the symphony regularly anymore and those two facts alone are likely to make you fall, flat, on the concrete. So, just: be aware, first. Anyway. I managed not to fall because I was super aware of sway-a-sway all safety precautions: first! all over the place, but I did manage to get some kind of . . .trick baton (?) that rolled to my feet on the walk there. It has a fuzzy end and I stuffed it into my bag like some prize and kept forgetting about it until each time I opened my bag to reach for something else. I've been advised to set the fuzzy end on fire, which I think is pretty good advice. Last night was one of those nights where in the final hour of drinking the body does everything in its power to shut me down because it feels its been drinking for eight hours and fuck you, caro, that’s long enough you bitch you do own a bed, you know. It’ll start doing stuff like enamoring me to black lint balls on the carpet, being unable to properly grasp plastic cups of gin, being unable to discern the tread of a conversation once it reaches upsidedown space ships! and, if that doesn’t work then hiccups for the first time in years get into and out of this cab and fall into that bed right now, right now or I’ll never let you breathe again.
Ah but wait. I need to put you through more. Have to call back Graeme first. I have to let him share in this the first sign of my body truly giving up on me, which I was convinced, at that point, was those hiccups. Painful enough, sailors. The funny thing about hiccups is that there's this intense moment after each one where you think this one. this one will be The Last One. They just can't go on from there. But we all know they do. When they're that angry with you, they stop when they want to stop and no amount of holding your breath will get you out of this one.
you will remember that shortly after we begun talking your hiccups subsided.
not saying that i am a cure-all, only that we are dealing with a coincidence here, perhaps even a correlation.
i was pawing through my great-grandmother's dusty book collection this afternoon, found an essay by robert louis stevenson which has a condemnation of awkward and sloppy sentence structure expressed through what (now) seems like the most awkward and sloppy sentences possible. also: a point reminding would-be men (only men, i'm afraid) of letters of the utmost necessity of brevity. this sentence is somewhere in the area of a hundred and fifty words.
b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-t.
also: he used the word 'singular' like it was going out of style, which i guess it was.
wait, there's more -
i believe i told you the story of my father throwing two litres of pop in the freezer in order to cool it down that much quicker, only to have the thing burst inside, blow the door open, and rocket out towards a very surprised dinner-in-progress...
Iesu! coincidence city!
Posted by: graeme at August 7, 2006 5:19 PMJesteś wspaniały!
Posted by: graeme at August 7, 2006 5:21 PMThis post may be one of your Best Posts.
They just can't go on from there.
Brilliant.
love,
Xavier
a bevy can be lame after 8hrs. I can buya 26 bourbon for 10 bux.
written on cellphone.
I think that if you are drinking gin out of a plastic cup, that alone is a sign you need to stop. But I'm a snob, as you well know. And I think gin only goes well with tonic, which is a clear sign that I've lived in England too long.
Did you go to Symphony Splash? I was just saying to my friend that I hoped the musicians don't get seasick, when you started talking about swaaaaayiiiiing....
Edita, darling,
But you are not the proud owner of, perhaps, a minor alcohol problem now, are you? Though, even those with their tongues lacerated from the bottle have their acute preferences—if not only at the start of the night, when the throat’s still dry and thirsty for taste of a particular sort. I, for one, can’t stand the consistency of gin + tonic, which is not so much a rebellion against stiff-collar colonial attitudes, as it is a cry against the simple property of stickiness. Gin goes with many things that render it more pleasant for me. My biases, gleaned. Gin Tonic? I’ll take it with juice, and disgustingly for most: soda. Or, even better: Vodka soda. Or vodka ad nausea. Cough.
Yes, went to symphony splash. We were well back from the orchestra. And, uhh, the lawn chairs holding the ass of many, many, many an audience member. Good time. I think we caught the second half of it only. Which was good, because I don’t think I would have been able to stand for much longer than what we were there for. Cough.
m-figment,
i won't say anything about how jealous i am. this should only be taken as an implication, of sorts.
Posted by: caroline at August 8, 2006 12:09 PMxavier--
i realize, fully you see, that i have taken to writing only about the more tragically comical elements and events in my life while almost entirely ignoring all the smooth stuff going off without hitch. i'm at this morning after place in text where i can't stop prostrating myself: WHAM! woman down. what else is "going on"? well. whatever. that's somehow ceased to be of any interest to me.
xoxo
graeme,
lack me.
lack you.
(hardest; firmest),
TOTAL CURE ALL FOR FAULTY TIMES,
youngster
along with your lovely self, i'd like for you to bring these books home as POA will allow one to do--? there's more tracing to do along the pawlines. there's little i love more than clawing my way through the firm consistency of catching an author out--it lends well to ease of self. all irony depends on is time. progression of events to mismatched correlation!
ah, mój chopiec.
xoxoxoxo!! xx'