wildcat

Yesterday was one of those convoluted days that started out with a plan to have coffee with Christian and then ballooned, cocooning-caterpillar-like, into a segmented journey through Victoria, or something.

Starting in Munro's with Harlan Ellison and Banana Yoshimoto and then ice cream at the gelatti shop; Chintz & Company to look at things we can't afford, no, and narrow lanes filled, it's where yuppies go to die; Value Village to beef up Christian's kitchen with expensive pots for nine dollars, dust filling up our lungs until we got past the trainee cashier and made it into the street. Chinatown stores to look at plates and bamboo mats.

Then: The Patch, to stand in changing rooms under the awful light, looking into the mirror and feeling fat, and sallow, and doomed. I think they'd sell more clothing if the lights made you look attractive and fresh. It's all just bad food photography. Then we walked up to Moka House and there was cheesecake, and iced tea, and pallid baristas who recognized me from previous low patches that always linger like a background, you used to work at... and other baristas that probably moonlight acting in teen horror flicks with Rose McGowan and Paris Hilton*.

We walked in one direction through Beacon Hill Park to Christian's apartment, dropped his stuff off, lost his phone, found his phone, went to the Thrifty's to get snacks to go with a bottle of wine and called Michael to meet us in the park for same. Along the way I tried to explain the joys of Ray Bradbury to Christian but utterly failed, I think, because I kept repeating myself and words like simple, clean, poetic, crisp. Fucking crisp. Anyway: The Illustrated Man. Read it, if only for his description of the rains on Venus:

"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunnelled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain and it never stopped."
- Ray Bradbury, "The Long Rain."

We scared off some family function over by the bandshell and were left to eat and Michael joined up with us and we drank and then it got terribly dark and Michael took photographs, as he does and then we wandered back to Christian's when it was too dark and cold and finished up for a bit before heading off for the night.

There was an episode of Dead Like Me in there, the one sad one, and snippets of Prospero's Books because Christian has it on his computer and we're going to sit down one evening and watch the whole thing. He's going to use it in one of the classes he's teaching. And a documentary on the Beat Generation, narrated by Allen Ginsberg which was not nearly as peculiar as that documentary on the history of America's railroads, hosted by Johnny Cash.

Because nothing will be as peculiar as that, ever, especially once Johnny Cash is in period costuming.

Regardless, I've finished warming the digits and I have a task: third draft. Motors running, Annie Lennox pumping, curtains open, light pouring, on we go!

* - Christian is far funnier than I am.