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.
