3 March 2010

It’s funny that I wrote such vast amounts yesterday, and yet neglected to mention that I had lost my job. Do you find this odd? I find this odd now, upon reflection. I sat here for a good minute or two deciding on an opening for today’s post, fearing that I would really have nothing to say. But of course I do! I lost my job yesterday! Incidentally, don’t go speculating that I actually have nothing to say all of the time… You nihilist… Take your futility and be off with you. There’s nothing here for you. Just the way you like it, I suppose.

For the rest of us, let’s cover the unemployment ground for at least a moment. The trouble with writing this blog without the cover of anonymity is that certain people need to be protected from my pen. We’ll my pen won’t hurt them (neither will my keyboard, you pedant), but my confidences to you, my reader, might, this being a public forum. That being the case, let’s just dance around the truth, just like Mr Hemingway does in that last passage of A Moveable Feast which you could read over and over just to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, having been so used to his plain-English, discrete sparseness for so long, and still you can’t quite make out what exactly he’s on about. So you make it up for yourself using his intimations. Don’t bother doing that here – wasted energy. Just accept that it’s sufficient to say that I knew I was getting the boot sometime last week and it was on the cards since … oh, I don’t know, let’s say the moment I started this silly job racket last February.

There have been three or more imperatives to the reader in this post so far. Let me apologise. I put it down to the ibuprofen that I’ve taken for my toothache, which is riding in the wake of the super-bug, which follows the upheaval of the home-relocation (and probably the prospective job loss, or so you might think; I don’t think that myself). The builders upstairs begin banging and sawing afresh each time I let my eyes close for a moment. They’re an energetic bunch. The radiator makes the noise of a trickling waterfall at the end of my room. I haven’t decided yet whether it is soothing or chagrinating (Shakespeare made up words). The song on the play list elicits memories of my darling first husband and our honeymoon period. It’s very “nineties”, terribly sweet and suicidal. I’d rather let me head fade into the zen wabi- sabi of the pain relief, whilst enjoying some darling sensation that it brings - it says, “Exactly right. It was time you freed yourself from the shackles of that office. You were stifled, bored and wretched. Come opportunity! I’ve recoiled enough. Now I’m ready to jump better – so say the French.” I agree with this. I acknowledge that it fell onto the screen like sloppy drool – again the fault of the Ibuprofen – but I completely agree.

I’ve just popped another one, justifying this by poking at the offending tooth with the tip of my tongue and still finding it painful. I’m not sure how hard I poked it as the loss of the grasp on my physical functions resembles a mushroom high – you know, the kind that takes away feeling and reason in the same fell swoop and leaves you to decide whether you’re a bungey cord or bird, or perhaps a slithering snake as you writhe around on the floor and you’re that guy at the party who everyone avoids and looks at in a worried fashion out of the corner of their eye whilst trying to keep up a light-hearted conversation, his face contorts in a growing agony and bliss, now up against the wall, pressing his head on the coolness of it, riding the flux of the waves in his brain and … ah, the sentence… it never ends … until I decide that you’ve got my point. There. You’ve got it.

Lesson learnt. One ibuprofen at a time. I’ve booked an appointment with the emergency appointment with the dentist for first thing tomorrow. Wish me luck for the rest of the evening. It’s sure to be a riot. Remind me to tell you the intimate and visceral details of the super-bug sometime. That was a riot too.

I also challenge you to make this post into a poem. Best poem gets nothing.

In return, here is a poem for you (with due acknowledgement to the cubists who turn in their rectangles):

Mario

Mario

Left his number

In the mail slot

On some folded paper.

And I know

That it was Mario’s -

He wrote “Mario”

At the top.

I don’t know

Who

Mario

Is…

True story.

She looked at that piece of paper for a long while as she cradled her tea and rested her hips into the back of the chair. Her mind considered the possibilities vaguely, but until the tea had taken its effect, her thoughts were too disordered to make any sound imaginings. It was a voice, a couple of faltering words and no sense of conversation. After a couple of slow laps of the hallway, taking the occasional sip, she returned to the phone number with then intention of making a decision. She decided against it. The variables were too exciting in contemplation and the truth would probably spoil it. That was her justification.

…

She walked down the high street expecting the usual catcalls. She passed the Turkish restaurant, the betting shop boys, the drug-dealer skulking around the corner. She passed her new friendly keeper of the superette and got as far as the first zebra-crossing before the first offender surfaced. He pulled up on his bicycle. He was dark and lovely but only if you could see passed the garish fluorescent yellow tracksuit that he had on. And it clearly was a choice he had made to wear this and not the requirement of his job. He actually must have thought, one day, at a shop, “I’ll buy this and wear it and the ladies will love me…”

And so he asked this particular lady, in his terribly north London accent, “Would you like to go home wiff me tonight, love?” And, he asked her in all seriousness. She declined, but couldn’t help but think, for the rest of her journey to the end of the High Street… what if… what delicious possibilities… Probably, rape. But the point was never the reality, was it? It was the possibility…