Thu, 19 May 2005

steping
It is good, sometimes, to be busy, to leave yourslef only enough time to do what needs to be done, to have to constantly consider what is three steps ahead, five steps ahead, twenty steps ahead, and take action accordingly. It is good in the days when you have bad dreams, when you attempt to step from old habits, when you wish upon stars for something to change. I thought about this as I watched the four of them, buzzing around the attic, crunch-time before some deadline none of them would speak of. Every time I come here, my ideas of what it means to be elderly are changed, stripped of the anodyne images the young feed on, the endearingly helpless, the terrifying death’s-headed bogeyman at the end of the antiseptic hospital hall. These people are smarter than I will ever be, than any of my self-styled genius friends will ever be, and the tasks to which they now apply that intellect are important in ways I can only pretend to understand.

Lester, having hit some sort of intellectual wall, decided he could decompress for a few minutes and return to surface level, which is to say he could take to me while we went out for coffee, so long as I didn’t ask him about the work.

“So she gave me the book,” I said, half to myself, so that if he didn’t want to talk about that he didn’t have to. Which was stupid; Lester by definition never had to talk about anything, content to stare you down while you tried to think of excuses to leave.

“You knew it was coming, man. You said yes.” Not a question, a statement of fact.

“Yep.

“You start reading it yet?”

“Nope.”

“That why you’re hanging around the attic being a pest?”

“Yep.”

“Listen, man, they’re just words. They only have the power you give to them. That’s what the people don’t recognize.”

“It’s not that, it’s more that if I do this, it’s like I draw a line in the sand with Ana, with everybody. It’s like I’m a pariah for doing the thing people want me to do.”

“Well now, it’s not like it’s just some incidental document. He went up to write it. He wrote it. And that’s all she wrote of that dumb bastard.”

“Lester, did you know him? Through the group?”

“Did I or did I not make a specific mandate as to us not discussing the group as you call it? For that you’re gonna buy the coffee.”

“I’m just fishing for something, something I should know but I don’t know it.”

Lester didn’t say anything after that, but he did nod once, more to himself than to me, after my last sentence. I spent the rest of the day keeping my mouth shut and paying attention, and what I saw was amazing.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #