excerpt from NaNoWriMo thing
1.
The woman moves around behind you. She’s too old for those tight black pants though they look good on her; still there’s something about dignity and the way her gaze is hard too hard; youngsters try to make it hard but they’re soft so it works well in the larger picture, it’s more full and rich and you love them for their childishness, they’re all over the place, the kids with the dark eyeshadow, that kid with the wrestling shoes and the eighties punk haircut peeling down in a waxed black bang over one eye sprouted on top concertedly sullen you go to him and tell him you love him, or more precisely you love his type. He looks at you and says what is my type? You court him during the evening, departing for long periods; he takes long drags at his cigarette before answering questions (you spend much time outside while he smokes jumping up and down wishing you had your hoody on; it was stolen when you left it crammed behind the jukebox, well OK it was swollen wet with beer in the hood and you may have thrown it away anyway rather than carry it home, but you hope the thieves wrapped it tight around their head whoever it was, no doubt it’s in an alley now) he refuses not to be sullen so you leave him after a time to go wander the crowd again. You are short and men look down on you with a sort of discovery that gives them a feeling of ownership. Hey there one long man says, too tall, his adams apple working as he smiles off and on; he bends to your level to speak. You saw him dancing a minute ago. He was a freakish dancer throwing himself all about with long pointy joints; but here he is saying, You getting lost down there sugar? You want an extra bourbon, he says, I got two because they’re closing soon but I don’t want it, I got it to give away to a woman, and I figured the best women would want stiff bourbon. Don’t drink it too fast. The older woman still stands back there looking at you in her darkness, her dark outfit, her hard lips outlined in blackish it seems, which prompts you to take the bourbon, you would have anyway of course and sip it, talking to this man whom you tell frankly to his face that he is charming, has a nice laid back attitude about him; but as you are telling him this with all frankness the three you came here with (you had almost forgotten them) walk by you quickly and then with urgency pull you along by your elbow. What’s up you ask once you get outside, Nothing urgent, he says, glancing everywhere but you, just that one of the three is sick, plus it seems there was some unpleasantness where the sick one was playing it up a little no doubt, Clark in his black Maoist cap was playing it up a little but he fell backward to emphasize his sickness for he’s a drama queen, though he really is sick, and he fell against another guy who was telling a story illustrating which he had his hand and forefinger outstretched, which forefinger apparently was bumped straight into his girlfriend’s eye, which ended up not bloody but bloodshot, a real hard poke, and the guy was drunk much bigger than they were but too drunk to move and so realizing this they took him in the bathroom saying they were going out back to settle this and made him sit down the hard way, telling him all the while it was an accident and he should chill, here you go here’s help for chilling, just chill now, just chill, it’s the way of things.
Anyway get in the car he says, we have to leave, and you say who says I am going home with you, I didn’t come here to go home with you, and he says oh sure well fuck you then, you think he has designs on you though you gave him no reason to have them, in fact you don’t have plans to pick up someone here tonight and only came here for lack of anything better to do, but were only responding this way because of his presumption, you feels it’s important to keep up a strong face since you’re a short woman, waifish even as they say, you are the same age as these but you send them off like children to their beds, go on home to bed you tell him to be mean. yeah, he says not looking at you anymore as he runs across the street where the other two are, the sick one leaning against the car puking down the drivers door.
Inside the tall man is talking to some woman but you come up to him and throw your arm around him and watch the girl who is immediately confused and he tells her smiling she’s not my girlfriend but she did get here first. So you immediately tell him you usually don’t do such things but you had a selfish reason, you need a ride home, can he give you one? He asks if it’s far and you say it shouldn’t matter, should it, and he says it might depending on whether you live far away or not. You chug the rest of your bourbon which was still on the counter though melted now and you say that if he can just guarantee you a ride you can work out all the other details like whether your place is close to his or not, you can work that out OK, all these things are under your command, it’s the ride itself just the bare fact of the ride that you need. If that’s the case then yes he says he can give you a ride. If you can guarantee your house will be close to his. He tosses back the rest of his drink and looks about the crowd. You are thinking that you still have the option to jump him later - or have him jump you - more from clinical interest than anything else, since he may be twice as tall as you: it would be like climbing a jungle gym; but the option not to jump or be jumped is there as well, so you settle in to listen to him, for he is speaking now, no not actually speaking yet but it turns out his scanning the crowd was not looking for chicks or friends but rather a collecting of thoughts for an address to you. He is nodding his head in a mellow way as words work their way from his soul up through that long neck to his mouth (it immediately raises your hackles, you wish for no addresses), then he starts asking you questions, and though you wish to be friendly this bourbon has conquered your smallish body and you feel that answering such questions is beyond what you owe, so at first when he asks you if you’re still in school (the banality of it makes you want to puke) you tell him that you had designs to be a horticulturist but had settled on the unorthodox but personally more satisfactory route of going with a Zen master who gardened as a practice and who said you could be a good pupil but would have to go back and simply grow plants, grow them, tend a garden, do nothing else, do this for five years and so you were doing this starting with your parents’ lawn which you seeded once the next season and then watched and cut it from time to time so that they had a very finely cut lawn that never had time to get shaggy, though she would get bored between cuts and so had secretly taken up online trading, hadn’t traded anything yet since you had no money but you watched it happening and read about it. That and downloaded itunes music on your parents’ computer, nine tenths of which you thought they’d like and that one last tenth you knew you wouldn’t but told them you had thought they would because they had given you permission to download for them remarking that her taste should be so similar to theirs, odd, they liked everything you downloaded though you knew they were judiciously avoiding mentioning those few songs that you knew they’d hate, though they finally did mention them and you said well you’d thought they’d like them because they were such adventurous types in their music choices, didn’t they know all this music was considered ahead of its time now in a retro way, that it was all coming back in, only the hip kids listened to it – it was all seventies stuff, mellow gold, the righteous brothers etc. – which seemed to make them feel happy; they were such supportive parents that you even had rein to make fun of them and they either didn’t get it or didn’t care and that was why you knew you were going to be something someday because you had that deep down love of yourself, although sometimes you wondered if it weren’t the flipside of a profound self-loathing, did he know what you meant? All of this bullshit of course, made up out of irritation with the question, though really it started out bullshit and became truer and truer as she went. He said, OK, how old are you? Which was the straw so instead of bullshit him again (you couldn’t tell if he were entertained or not and if so on which level, was he entertained by what you said or by your saying it or one some higher level where he didn’t find you entertaining so much as listening to you) you told him that you might as well tell him that was all bullshit, honestly I’d rather not talk about myself if that’s OK, it just bores me and I feel like if this is true I should at least tell you so. What are you into you ask abruptly to show that the questioning process he initiated still has your respect.
He plays music, it turns out. Also he is an actor, but music is the first thing. He is unusual in that he doesn’t care about acting but in fact he makes money at it, he was objective he said, it’s just objectivity people lack, people get to wanting something they ought not to want, I didn’t really want it so when it seemed clear I could do it I knew that was objective, I’m not acting in anything huge he says, a tuna commercial was the last big thing, I was a neighbor leaning on the sill of one of those old fashioned doors that has an upper and lower half, the upper half being open and he leans in to say hello, a false cheesy painted background behind him of a barn and a bright yellow sun, he says hello to the neighbor and asks to borrow a cup of sugar, but screw tuna she says, try this tuna. She ends up turning him onto this tuna and it’s clear that a romance has formed though she’s bad girl enough to slam the upper part of the door on him, catching his fingers in the cracks. They told him it would be a major national ad though he can’t think of where they would show such an ad, it would run in the future, they said, it would run for alternative markets, this is the way it was all going, they said, and he thought perhaps they were right but he couldn’t say for sure because he himself didn’t have a TV and didn’t know what the standards were on commercials these days and wouldn’t know if they ran it or if they still planned to run it; it was a good experience to act in it nonetheless he said. They had told him it was ahead of its time, it was very tongue-in-cheek, he and the young woman in the video were such young hipsters, this facial hair he has now he says was grown for the ad he says (he has long sideburns that angle around sharply to point to his mouth, and a little imperial tuft beneath his lip), and the girl who gave him the tuna was a lean waifish thing with bleached hair that was incidentally perfectly smooth so that even when a light was behind it there were no stray hairs to catch light and make that familiar little light halo – he had touched it once without comment, run his massive palm over it to discover its smoothness for himself, then had walked on without comment; but he was saying that besides good hair she actually had a perfect personality, that is, while they were shooting, he said, when the camera was on she was incredibly charismatic, he wanted her despite himself, and when it was off she joked around in a variation on the same personality, less overtly hot, friendlier, even more charismatic so that he ached for her during the entire shoot, which was only a few days. She was a perfect woman, she flirted just the right amount, had wit but not in a way that made you feel unwitty, she leaned up against him in a trusting way when she talked to him. But as soon as the shoot was over she stayed at the opposite side of the set from him he felt, she went deep into her makeup room, he didn’t see her again until she was putting some business cards given her by the adoring lighting staff into her purse, she looked up and said to him directly that she might as well tell him her normal speech. She told him not to take offense but that he shouldn’t expect anything; in the past it has happened many times that her co-stars would read her on-set personality in a personal way, feel that something had happened between them, she feels very awkward about it and no doubt it’s a result of her own immaturity but she hasn’t figured out a way to keep this from happening, she has a gift of charisma, she says, and she uses it to make the shoot go well, she wins auditions with it she says and then maintains it during a shoot to keep the energy up between the crew and herself and her co-star, it’s all about that energy, she feels it is part of her in fact, part of her duty, though in reality she says she must confess that she is finding she is not so friendly nor sexy herself, personally, clearly this is confusing and she doesn’t understand it herself, she must be genuinely charismatic and friendly and sexy in some way she says but she’s been burned a time or two before and it feels now like a gift she happens to have but doesn’t take personally like if she had a gift for distinguishing birdsong or for playing bocce neither of which she cares much about. It’s not a way she feels comfortable being in her real life says, it’s always ended up disastrous she says, she herself has no way of knowing who to turn the charisma on for, the men who have come in have felt it promised something to them she couldn’t give, once she suddenly felt a great detachment from it all (they are sitting on a bench as she tells him all this he adds, she has kindly taken the time to sit and explain this in detail) and that this detachment was a sudden happiness she prefers to take refuge in even if means an apparent coldness. She is telling him all this because she likes him, she says, she means nothing personal by it (and really she says all this very coldly he says, very coldly, she looks him in the eye but there’s a coldness there, helped along by her intensely blue eyes, she has no hint of a smile). She has ended up being stalked by people she has worked with she says people who she thought she could at least be friends with, she wonders in fact if she had been guilty of fraud of a kind and this torments her for in fact she has worked with nice people and this includes you of course (again, he emphasizes, she said all this very coldly, in flat tones) and it’s just a gap between her and others but it’s OK she says it’s a strange world. OK? She ends it all with an OK, they shake hands, everyone else is gone by now, she walks away, he asks her if she wants a ride and she says he should know better, it’s something she just can’t do, she just can’t do it.
By this time of course you two are well out of the bar which closed up while you were telling your own story about the lawn and had you standing outside in the cold so that eventually without talking about it you both had begun walking to keep warm and now you have walked for a mile or so and are down into Silverlake. You wonder if he told you this all as a revenge lie for your own lie or in the spirit of unbridled creativity or if he merely thought it interesting or if he were trying to communicate something to you something about vulnerability and about women, if he’s trying to warn you or protect himself, so that decide you will indeed be warned and will be aggressive toward him, put him to the test. But no, he is not done yet. He concludes that the interesting thing about it which has helped him form a new theory of people is that he went home and felt heartbreak for several weeks, he couldn’t shake it, he was down, he felt angry with people, he saw the worst in everyone, he exploited his height to be imposing, he glowered down from the heights, and then finally he woke up one day with a serenity he had never had before, his personality had been more or less the same as it was now, the genial giant, but it hadn’t been as deep, he thinks, he hears this from others too, it’s a deeper geniality now, he woke up not feeling anger anymore, feeling a kind of detachment, and he realizes that what she had she had passed on to him, that she had communicated it like a virus, and he gesticulates with his large hands like paddles as he says these things, that he now has for better or worse gained some distance from things and people that might seem cold to some but is in fact he says more loving he says in the old-fashioned sense of love, in the sense of love as something deep, it’s calm, he rises above things,
So you are now well into Silverlake and it seems he is following a certain path because you are on a residential street and you say this seems to be a route you know and he says well yes, he didn’t mean to but he’s just been heading home on auto-pilot, anyway this should be OK because you had told him his house was close to yours, and if you had control over these things then surely you could make it quite close to his so he would just head to his place, and it was nice they were getting exercise wasn’t it? Every time then he takes a turn you say yes in fact you are getting warmer, we’re almost there, he is in a lovely section of houses now, a street lined with trees with sidewalk passing by fences and yards and lots of houses with porches and porch lights on glowing warmly like welcoming strangers cozy and there are actually enough trees here to hear some crickets and there is the scent of skunk in the air. We get deer here he says and also coyotes but not it seems at the same time. He enters the gate of a small iron fence with white slats and says still this way and you say yes it’s through here this isn’t the main way but it’s a shortcut I can go this way. `
The woman moves around behind you. She’s too old for those tight black pants though they look good on her; still there’s something about dignity and the way her gaze is hard too hard; youngsters try to make it hard but they’re soft so it works well in the larger picture, it’s more full and rich and you love them for their childishness, they’re all over the place, the kids with the dark eyeshadow, that kid with the wrestling shoes and the eighties punk haircut peeling down in a waxed black bang over one eye sprouted on top concertedly sullen you go to him and tell him you love him, or more precisely you love his type. He looks at you and says what is my type? You court him during the evening, departing for long periods; he takes long drags at his cigarette before answering questions (you spend much time outside while he smokes jumping up and down wishing you had your hoody on; it was stolen when you left it crammed behind the jukebox, well OK it was swollen wet with beer in the hood and you may have thrown it away anyway rather than carry it home, but you hope the thieves wrapped it tight around their head whoever it was, no doubt it’s in an alley now) he refuses not to be sullen so you leave him after a time to go wander the crowd again. You are short and men look down on you with a sort of discovery that gives them a feeling of ownership. Hey there one long man says, too tall, his adams apple working as he smiles off and on; he bends to your level to speak. You saw him dancing a minute ago. He was a freakish dancer throwing himself all about with long pointy joints; but here he is saying, You getting lost down there sugar? You want an extra bourbon, he says, I got two because they’re closing soon but I don’t want it, I got it to give away to a woman, and I figured the best women would want stiff bourbon. Don’t drink it too fast. The older woman still stands back there looking at you in her darkness, her dark outfit, her hard lips outlined in blackish it seems, which prompts you to take the bourbon, you would have anyway of course and sip it, talking to this man whom you tell frankly to his face that he is charming, has a nice laid back attitude about him; but as you are telling him this with all frankness the three you came here with (you had almost forgotten them) walk by you quickly and then with urgency pull you along by your elbow. What’s up you ask once you get outside, Nothing urgent, he says, glancing everywhere but you, just that one of the three is sick, plus it seems there was some unpleasantness where the sick one was playing it up a little no doubt, Clark in his black Maoist cap was playing it up a little but he fell backward to emphasize his sickness for he’s a drama queen, though he really is sick, and he fell against another guy who was telling a story illustrating which he had his hand and forefinger outstretched, which forefinger apparently was bumped straight into his girlfriend’s eye, which ended up not bloody but bloodshot, a real hard poke, and the guy was drunk much bigger than they were but too drunk to move and so realizing this they took him in the bathroom saying they were going out back to settle this and made him sit down the hard way, telling him all the while it was an accident and he should chill, here you go here’s help for chilling, just chill now, just chill, it’s the way of things.
Anyway get in the car he says, we have to leave, and you say who says I am going home with you, I didn’t come here to go home with you, and he says oh sure well fuck you then, you think he has designs on you though you gave him no reason to have them, in fact you don’t have plans to pick up someone here tonight and only came here for lack of anything better to do, but were only responding this way because of his presumption, you feels it’s important to keep up a strong face since you’re a short woman, waifish even as they say, you are the same age as these but you send them off like children to their beds, go on home to bed you tell him to be mean. yeah, he says not looking at you anymore as he runs across the street where the other two are, the sick one leaning against the car puking down the drivers door.
Inside the tall man is talking to some woman but you come up to him and throw your arm around him and watch the girl who is immediately confused and he tells her smiling she’s not my girlfriend but she did get here first. So you immediately tell him you usually don’t do such things but you had a selfish reason, you need a ride home, can he give you one? He asks if it’s far and you say it shouldn’t matter, should it, and he says it might depending on whether you live far away or not. You chug the rest of your bourbon which was still on the counter though melted now and you say that if he can just guarantee you a ride you can work out all the other details like whether your place is close to his or not, you can work that out OK, all these things are under your command, it’s the ride itself just the bare fact of the ride that you need. If that’s the case then yes he says he can give you a ride. If you can guarantee your house will be close to his. He tosses back the rest of his drink and looks about the crowd. You are thinking that you still have the option to jump him later - or have him jump you - more from clinical interest than anything else, since he may be twice as tall as you: it would be like climbing a jungle gym; but the option not to jump or be jumped is there as well, so you settle in to listen to him, for he is speaking now, no not actually speaking yet but it turns out his scanning the crowd was not looking for chicks or friends but rather a collecting of thoughts for an address to you. He is nodding his head in a mellow way as words work their way from his soul up through that long neck to his mouth (it immediately raises your hackles, you wish for no addresses), then he starts asking you questions, and though you wish to be friendly this bourbon has conquered your smallish body and you feel that answering such questions is beyond what you owe, so at first when he asks you if you’re still in school (the banality of it makes you want to puke) you tell him that you had designs to be a horticulturist but had settled on the unorthodox but personally more satisfactory route of going with a Zen master who gardened as a practice and who said you could be a good pupil but would have to go back and simply grow plants, grow them, tend a garden, do nothing else, do this for five years and so you were doing this starting with your parents’ lawn which you seeded once the next season and then watched and cut it from time to time so that they had a very finely cut lawn that never had time to get shaggy, though she would get bored between cuts and so had secretly taken up online trading, hadn’t traded anything yet since you had no money but you watched it happening and read about it. That and downloaded itunes music on your parents’ computer, nine tenths of which you thought they’d like and that one last tenth you knew you wouldn’t but told them you had thought they would because they had given you permission to download for them remarking that her taste should be so similar to theirs, odd, they liked everything you downloaded though you knew they were judiciously avoiding mentioning those few songs that you knew they’d hate, though they finally did mention them and you said well you’d thought they’d like them because they were such adventurous types in their music choices, didn’t they know all this music was considered ahead of its time now in a retro way, that it was all coming back in, only the hip kids listened to it – it was all seventies stuff, mellow gold, the righteous brothers etc. – which seemed to make them feel happy; they were such supportive parents that you even had rein to make fun of them and they either didn’t get it or didn’t care and that was why you knew you were going to be something someday because you had that deep down love of yourself, although sometimes you wondered if it weren’t the flipside of a profound self-loathing, did he know what you meant? All of this bullshit of course, made up out of irritation with the question, though really it started out bullshit and became truer and truer as she went. He said, OK, how old are you? Which was the straw so instead of bullshit him again (you couldn’t tell if he were entertained or not and if so on which level, was he entertained by what you said or by your saying it or one some higher level where he didn’t find you entertaining so much as listening to you) you told him that you might as well tell him that was all bullshit, honestly I’d rather not talk about myself if that’s OK, it just bores me and I feel like if this is true I should at least tell you so. What are you into you ask abruptly to show that the questioning process he initiated still has your respect.
He plays music, it turns out. Also he is an actor, but music is the first thing. He is unusual in that he doesn’t care about acting but in fact he makes money at it, he was objective he said, it’s just objectivity people lack, people get to wanting something they ought not to want, I didn’t really want it so when it seemed clear I could do it I knew that was objective, I’m not acting in anything huge he says, a tuna commercial was the last big thing, I was a neighbor leaning on the sill of one of those old fashioned doors that has an upper and lower half, the upper half being open and he leans in to say hello, a false cheesy painted background behind him of a barn and a bright yellow sun, he says hello to the neighbor and asks to borrow a cup of sugar, but screw tuna she says, try this tuna. She ends up turning him onto this tuna and it’s clear that a romance has formed though she’s bad girl enough to slam the upper part of the door on him, catching his fingers in the cracks. They told him it would be a major national ad though he can’t think of where they would show such an ad, it would run in the future, they said, it would run for alternative markets, this is the way it was all going, they said, and he thought perhaps they were right but he couldn’t say for sure because he himself didn’t have a TV and didn’t know what the standards were on commercials these days and wouldn’t know if they ran it or if they still planned to run it; it was a good experience to act in it nonetheless he said. They had told him it was ahead of its time, it was very tongue-in-cheek, he and the young woman in the video were such young hipsters, this facial hair he has now he says was grown for the ad he says (he has long sideburns that angle around sharply to point to his mouth, and a little imperial tuft beneath his lip), and the girl who gave him the tuna was a lean waifish thing with bleached hair that was incidentally perfectly smooth so that even when a light was behind it there were no stray hairs to catch light and make that familiar little light halo – he had touched it once without comment, run his massive palm over it to discover its smoothness for himself, then had walked on without comment; but he was saying that besides good hair she actually had a perfect personality, that is, while they were shooting, he said, when the camera was on she was incredibly charismatic, he wanted her despite himself, and when it was off she joked around in a variation on the same personality, less overtly hot, friendlier, even more charismatic so that he ached for her during the entire shoot, which was only a few days. She was a perfect woman, she flirted just the right amount, had wit but not in a way that made you feel unwitty, she leaned up against him in a trusting way when she talked to him. But as soon as the shoot was over she stayed at the opposite side of the set from him he felt, she went deep into her makeup room, he didn’t see her again until she was putting some business cards given her by the adoring lighting staff into her purse, she looked up and said to him directly that she might as well tell him her normal speech. She told him not to take offense but that he shouldn’t expect anything; in the past it has happened many times that her co-stars would read her on-set personality in a personal way, feel that something had happened between them, she feels very awkward about it and no doubt it’s a result of her own immaturity but she hasn’t figured out a way to keep this from happening, she has a gift of charisma, she says, and she uses it to make the shoot go well, she wins auditions with it she says and then maintains it during a shoot to keep the energy up between the crew and herself and her co-star, it’s all about that energy, she feels it is part of her in fact, part of her duty, though in reality she says she must confess that she is finding she is not so friendly nor sexy herself, personally, clearly this is confusing and she doesn’t understand it herself, she must be genuinely charismatic and friendly and sexy in some way she says but she’s been burned a time or two before and it feels now like a gift she happens to have but doesn’t take personally like if she had a gift for distinguishing birdsong or for playing bocce neither of which she cares much about. It’s not a way she feels comfortable being in her real life says, it’s always ended up disastrous she says, she herself has no way of knowing who to turn the charisma on for, the men who have come in have felt it promised something to them she couldn’t give, once she suddenly felt a great detachment from it all (they are sitting on a bench as she tells him all this he adds, she has kindly taken the time to sit and explain this in detail) and that this detachment was a sudden happiness she prefers to take refuge in even if means an apparent coldness. She is telling him all this because she likes him, she says, she means nothing personal by it (and really she says all this very coldly he says, very coldly, she looks him in the eye but there’s a coldness there, helped along by her intensely blue eyes, she has no hint of a smile). She has ended up being stalked by people she has worked with she says people who she thought she could at least be friends with, she wonders in fact if she had been guilty of fraud of a kind and this torments her for in fact she has worked with nice people and this includes you of course (again, he emphasizes, she said all this very coldly, in flat tones) and it’s just a gap between her and others but it’s OK she says it’s a strange world. OK? She ends it all with an OK, they shake hands, everyone else is gone by now, she walks away, he asks her if she wants a ride and she says he should know better, it’s something she just can’t do, she just can’t do it.
By this time of course you two are well out of the bar which closed up while you were telling your own story about the lawn and had you standing outside in the cold so that eventually without talking about it you both had begun walking to keep warm and now you have walked for a mile or so and are down into Silverlake. You wonder if he told you this all as a revenge lie for your own lie or in the spirit of unbridled creativity or if he merely thought it interesting or if he were trying to communicate something to you something about vulnerability and about women, if he’s trying to warn you or protect himself, so that decide you will indeed be warned and will be aggressive toward him, put him to the test. But no, he is not done yet. He concludes that the interesting thing about it which has helped him form a new theory of people is that he went home and felt heartbreak for several weeks, he couldn’t shake it, he was down, he felt angry with people, he saw the worst in everyone, he exploited his height to be imposing, he glowered down from the heights, and then finally he woke up one day with a serenity he had never had before, his personality had been more or less the same as it was now, the genial giant, but it hadn’t been as deep, he thinks, he hears this from others too, it’s a deeper geniality now, he woke up not feeling anger anymore, feeling a kind of detachment, and he realizes that what she had she had passed on to him, that she had communicated it like a virus, and he gesticulates with his large hands like paddles as he says these things, that he now has for better or worse gained some distance from things and people that might seem cold to some but is in fact he says more loving he says in the old-fashioned sense of love, in the sense of love as something deep, it’s calm, he rises above things,
So you are now well into Silverlake and it seems he is following a certain path because you are on a residential street and you say this seems to be a route you know and he says well yes, he didn’t mean to but he’s just been heading home on auto-pilot, anyway this should be OK because you had told him his house was close to yours, and if you had control over these things then surely you could make it quite close to his so he would just head to his place, and it was nice they were getting exercise wasn’t it? Every time then he takes a turn you say yes in fact you are getting warmer, we’re almost there, he is in a lovely section of houses now, a street lined with trees with sidewalk passing by fences and yards and lots of houses with porches and porch lights on glowing warmly like welcoming strangers cozy and there are actually enough trees here to hear some crickets and there is the scent of skunk in the air. We get deer here he says and also coyotes but not it seems at the same time. He enters the gate of a small iron fence with white slats and says still this way and you say yes it’s through here this isn’t the main way but it’s a shortcut I can go this way. `
posted by bl at 6:32 PM
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