People, Emotions, Deadlines

A huge crane dragon

Eating down a house

Of fine bricks and mortar

Crossing the small junction where there are a total of three traffic lights, I guess someone must have flagged safety or there’d been an accident, houses - whole streets more like are being bulldozed. It’s very dusty underfoot and quite loud overhead, lots of crunching and gargling from the machines. The crane that nudges the red walls thumps them harder and the bricks fall apart and crash down somewhere to make noise, which is drowned out by other noise, like aeroplanes and sirens.

The waking up in the mornings has been set to a different rhythm; since I’ve stopped smoking I've woken up with a clear throat but a fuzzier head, which I admit is unexpected. Less clarity in what I’m doing and usually hungry, I wait for the kettle to boil most of the time indoors in my own space. It takes an aeon. I could have a bath in that time. Need a new kettle. That’s what I remember instead of the things I am supposed to remember like train time tables or days of the week. 

Note: Must buy a new better kettle.

Crunch goes the white frost

Underfoot

Days are getting visibly

Longer

A little bit of sun crept up over the window sill and across the floor boards timidly, under my boss’ foot, reaching up to the brick walls but never making it. Some cloud faded it out. The laptops flunk; gone haywire and the internet’s disappeared. The life of a city dweller is disappointing. I think back to Eleanor (refer to the Turtle’s song) and imagine her lying there in my bed every early morning when I woke up, snoozing like a platypus. Those two or three months stolen in time when we were between jobs and lives and continents, well I think, that was a casual miracle.

There’s a singing girl in canary yellow

On the District line

Voice warbles

Poles green

Like a Rousseau scene

The Bakerloo seats are the most ambitious in pattern and also carriage structure. They pallidly resemble the ideal of the early 70s where anything could happen but those who’d lived through the 60s were already jaded and turning sour. Bakerloo seats are the dirtiest on the Underground. Two men with their knees wide open stretched out in suits and loud voices discuss their private lives publicly, and to no one’s surprise the conversation goes something like…

Harold: A lot of my friends play golf three or four days a week because they’re so bored!

(John looks bored and nods)

Harold: And when you see them what do they talk about?

(John blinks)

Harold: Golf!

(John and Harold share a belly laugh that peters out)

John: I play golf

Harold: So do I

(beat)

Harold: I play golf but I don’t want it to become a way of life, you see what I mean?

(John nods)

Ad infinitum

Furrowing my brows I know I’ve become bitter, as age and stuff that seem to occur randomly and daily incrementally build up in the storage of my heart; good things past must dissolve. Memories piling up… the ones at the bottom of the pile subtly disappearing. I had to buy toothpaste in a supermarket and I hated how it made me feel bad that I bought the cheapest one because maybe I’m endangering my teeth and you only get one set. There are people being killed over cartoons and I’m in a queue where old women are complaining about banks not being people. A gay bookstore owner doesn’t like my show poster because it doesn’t look gay enough and I stumble on the grounds that the performer wears a leotard throughout but has a wife, so does that make the show gay (?) and I just feel awful. Having minor pangs of panic being elevated by lifts and conveyed across by escalators and the city is very dead looking compared to the seaside and I have to tap at my phone for some light sensation of human communication with a friend thousands of miles away letting her know it’s all too much.

Rachel: What’s too much?

(typing…)

Me: People

Me: Emotions

Me: Deadlines

(online)

(last seen today at 01:37)