Spring Break!

Some things I’ve been thinking about in the last 48 hours.

My friend Ramona was in town about a year ago. We met up for coffee at Alliance Bakery, then split. She was going to go dancing at Rainbo Club, Brianna and I were going to head south. Later, I asked Ramona how dancing went.

            “If by dancing you mean drinking 40s in an alley in the rain, very well.”

On a phone call waiting for some FAFSA info, the machine voice got tricky with verb tenses. “Your call was very important to us,” it said, and I waited for something bad to happen.

The manager at White Palace Grill was talking to a regular. “It's too, too expensive to fly into San Francisco. What you should do is fly into Oakland, save a hundred bucks, and take a fifteen-dollar train to San Francisco.” 

              I actually wrote this down in the book I was reading. When I got home and checked some prices, Oakland was somehow at least seventy-five dollars more. But that doesn’t make sense. So I still believe him.

I’ve watched two Werner Herzog documentaries in the past two weeks. Which isn’t a lot of anything by anyone’s standards, but I don’t watch many movies. After seeing Happy People and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I slummed onto YouTube to hear him talk more. I love his voice. During one interview, someone in the distance shoots him in the stomach with either a powerful pellet gun or a weak rifle. He taps his stomach and mumbles, then the camera cuts. Afterward, at the interviewer’s request, he reflects on the shot. “It was an insignificant bullet.”

I reread Conrad’s short story, “Youth”, because Heart of Darkness is too long to finish in a sitting, I think. Here is the setup for a quotation I enjoyed. After the coal they are trying to ship to Bangkok sets alight in the cargo, the ship explodes. When they meet another ship, it is described like this – “One of the boats dropped in the water, and walked towards us upon the sea with her long oars.”

 

Over break, I’ve been trying to write about this time I rode an elephant and felt icky afterward. In one cheesy paragraph I’ll probably have to cut, I think about big eyeballs on animals. Which animal has the biggest eyeball proportionate to body? The vampire squid. Which overall? The colossal squid, I think. I looked up elephant eyes, too. Really, they aren’t that big. When I went to sleep I had a nightmare wherein I asked Brianna about eyes, some weird eye question, and then rows upon rows of eyes appeared and she chased me, a departure from my usual nightmares that are about forgetting to lesson plan, etc. 

I try not to write about dreams, but it always happens.

And now I have to go to bed.