Mon, 25 Jul 2005

all of this is real
1995. When I lived in the apartment complex in Coralville, each building looked exactly the same, so that one night after working at the rest stop I pulled up to Building C instead of Building D and walked up to someone else’s door and prepared to put the key in the lock when I realized I was not at my apartment, the hibachi the prior tenant left wasn’t by the side of the door, there were small pictures I had never seen tucked into the corners of the windows, and I stopped for a minute. Perhaps, I thought, this happened to everyone here, the buildings were alike for a reason, so that if you ever became sick of your life you could walk into someone else’s apartment and begin again with new belongings, new clothes, a new girlfriend or boyfriend, and I thought if that is the case then I should not leave this to chance, I should find the ideal new apartment within which I will be reborn. I walked around the complex, examining the clues left on the porches, peeking into windows, listening to what little sound escaped through the door, until I found what I believed would be my ideal incarnation, a decision based less on actual facts as on a general premonition, a feeling of calm and comfort, and so I opened the door and stepped inside before something from the back of my mind screamed this is not real, this is someone’s apartment, you can’t just walk in here, none of this is real, and I froze, and looked around for a minute, telling myself to remember all this, every small detail, the keys on the counter and the magnets on the fridge, as this could have been my new life if only I believed, and I stepped back outside, closed the door, and went back to my room.

When I was in high school I knew a girl who never read books, or perhaps I should say she read by keeping books beneath her pillow while she slept, so that in the morning the entire book had found a way into her memory. This turned out to be not only an efficent use of time, but also led to a deeper understanding and recall of the text. I tried this strategy a few times but only pulled disjointed bits of the text out of my dreams, bits which were cobbled together with other half-forgotten information so that my actual reading was more difficult. I tried to convince her to try other objects to see if perhaps there were hidden stories not available to strictly textual readers, but she didn’t want to mess with a good thing.

I always thought plants didn’t talk to me because they lack mouths or lungs or vocal cords but maybe they’re just stuck up.

Sarah had worked at the grocery store for about a month when she learned the store had a basement set up exactly like the ground floor only the shelves were stocked with less popular specialty items. Shoppers could only access this second store if they knew the entry code at the back stairwell. There was a seperate staff who worked in the basement store, and the word among Sarah’s fellow cashiers was that they hated her. Sometimes, when Sarah was feeling too lazy to help with restock and killed time smoking by the delivery doors, she ruminated upon a sub-basement store with even less popular items, and a store beneath that store, and so on and so on all the way to hell.

Owen called last weekend and told me he was selling his telephone. I told him I had no need for another telephone and he said “Not yet! But soon the great telephone famine will arrive and you current telephone will wither and die! Entire cities of telephones will be wiped out within a week! Only old-fashioned rotary phones will survive! Can you afford *not* to be prepared?” I asked him what he intended to do after the mass telephone extinction event and he said he had trained himself to give up use of the telephone. “I have seen the signs in the stars and evolved beyond the telephone! Behold the superman!” I considered asking how this regimen led to his calling me on a, y’know, telephone, but instead I told him I only had three dollars and hadn’t even bought candy yet and immediately he hung up on me. The young people of today have no manners.

My grandfather told me the clouds used to look different when he was young. Now the clouds want to look like those famous clouds you see in the movies, and so dump moisture whenever possible, so that in a day you can see eight or nine clouds that look almost exactly alike. All clouds aspire to a perfect state of cloud-nature, but this is a mistake, as all clouds by definition are of the cloud-nature, and all this conformity is in fact a betrayal of the cloud-nature, which once expanded and deepened with every new form of every individual cloud, but those days are all over now. That’s why my grandfather bought his cannon, according to police records, in order to force the clouds to become themselves. He had a similar belief about how all houses aspired to be ruins, but I can’t remember the logic he used for that.
(17:25.07.25.2005) [/scrytch] #