things move around

CROWLAND’S Silver Jubilee committee was finally wound up on Thursday evening with a presentation ceremony at the library.

The jubilee fund, described by chairman Frank Parnell as ‘one of the finest efforts in Lincolnshire’, fremony at the library.

The jubilee fund, described by chairman Frank Parnell as ‘one remony atremony aremony at the library.

The jubremony at the library.

Tremony at remony at the library.

Thrremony at tremony at the liremoay at the libraremony at the library.

Theremony at the library.

The jubilee fund, described by chairman Frank Premony rremony at the liremony aremony at the libremoay atremony at tremony at the library.

Tremorremony at the library.remony at the library.

The jubilee fund, described by chairman Frank Parnell as ‘one of the finest efforts in Lincolnshire’, fm he latched onto a through ball. Although he was hauled down by the ’keeper he still managed to stroke the ball home.

But for the second week running Durant had to leave the field injured, this time suffering eye trouble.

The winning goal was another 25-yard shot – again from Blackstones’ central defender – coming from their second chance of the game.

Gary Cooper, recently signed from Queens Old Boys, had a good debut.

— Copyediting apocalypse/found poetry from a 1979 edition of the Peterborough Standard.

Dear diary,

It’s a year and four days to the day since I wrote in you. And my subject, I fear, is the same old tedious thing: the unkempt young man who mans the Sinclair station in this cold, odd, town. This time our conversation was shorter, but more intense: I overheard him telling the customer ahead of me that he (our hero, not the customer) could make things disappear, and then it went something like this:

- So, what can you make disappear? My bottle of wine? [laughter]
– [Puts my bottle of wine into the pocket of his track pants so that only the top sticks out]
– Almost! [laughter]
– So, what else?
– [puts wine back on counter and sets about ringing it up] Oh, boxes, cars, boats, trees, houses-
– Trees? We don’t want to make trees disappear. We want more trees!
– You’re right. I want just enough land for forty acres of trees, planted all round, I mean over, where I sink the house.
– What kinda trees would you want? I’d want the kind that lose their leaves in winter, deciduous. Oak, birch, beech.
– Yeah, I’d want any tree hardy enough to survive the winters round here.
– That’s only pine, my man. Cone-ifers.
– No, there are some deciduous trees hardy enough for this climate.
– Larch, I guess? I hear larch is hardy.
– Uh-huh. Well, bye.
– Well, bye.

And the door swung shut, and I was expelled into the cool dark air, too gelid to smell of sage grass.

A sagging paunch, an unkempt ginger beard, and dark, diseased eyes were what I noticed first about the 20-something man staffing the Sinclair I went to twice tonight, first for booze and then shortly after for more, prophylactic, booze. A bank of five slot machines twinkled hopefully in one corner of the store. I didn’t catch his name, but over the course of our two conversations he unfolded to me his plan to build a large residence using at least 100 shipping containers, on a local site as yet undetermined. The sea cans would be purchased on the coast, where a second hand specimen goes for as little as $1,000, although new or refurbished ones are dearer. Purchased at the port of Los Angeles and transported inland, connected, upholstered, furbished, plumbed, lit. “It’s not so much a house,” I ventured, “as a community that you want to build.” He nodded and said yes, all that was lacking was three hundred thousand dollars and a suitable plot of land. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this” he shouted after me as I went out into the cool dark air already smelling of sage grass.

He had a wet voice and, when I shook his hand later, a handshake like seaweed. But the handshake came after the sale and at that point it didn’t matter. What mattered was his weakness, his white flag. It came from the hesitancy in his voice and his shapelessness. You stood there talking to him, and a feeling of pity made itself felt like two hands weakly clutching your Achilles from behind. You had to stop charging on, and turn around to disengage them. And then -— blammo — you were engaged, caught in the pity trap.

Eat a banana
Talk to a cat
Flex biceps
Talk to myself
Get into bed

(not necessarily in that order)
(it’s OK to eat a banana in bed)

In the airport lounge
losers fondle phones or gab
piddling platitudes;
shovel petits-fours in gobs;
versify half-wittedly.

—

Most are merely dull,
but some exhibit horrid
eccentricities:
being “thrilled” on business calls;
loudly Englishing the maids.

I walked to the mall and bought a bottle of wine, nail clippers, and Asterix the Gaul in Portuguese. Now, at sunset, I’m reading the Asterix with delightful clipped nails, and drinking the wine with delightful peanuts. Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem emanates from my laptop and merges with the noise of the highway, spooling unevenly up into the hills around the city.

I woke up just before three a.m., because I had had a cointreau and (because that was the last of the cointreau) a grand marnier after dinner. I tried to sleep, micturated meagerly and tried to sleep again, dreaming of plausible absurdities until my alarm, or alarmo as it’s known on my phone due to a lazy thumb, played its spooky music an hour later.

I pissed again, showered, and left the door to my hotel room open so as not to wake sleepers by the closing of the latch. For the same reason I crept carrying my suitcase through the winding corridor floored with tiles and down the stairs to reception rather than shepherding it on its highly-compliant wheels. It is quite an amazing suitcase. Carry-on legal but bigger inside than out. Heavy-duty, light to lift. I’ve taken many more flights than it has but I sense that it nods and winks, so to speak, at my navigations. I think it could probably find its way without me.

At the bottom of the stairs Noddy waited for me. I call him that because he never sleeps but perpetually looks as though he must sleep or expire. The previous evening, at about 10:15, as I had ordered the cointreau and he had apologetically poured what was left of the bottle into the glass, I had said to him – I will just leave tomorrow morning, there’s no need for any formalities – but Noddy had looked at me sleepily and said that he would be there to see me off, formalities or no formalities. And so (at four a.m.) I handed him my key, encumbered by a humongous rustical fob, said – ’til next time -, and walked out (hefting my small but dense with filthy clothes and books suitcase) to the taxi.

I’m not really much of a taxi conversationalist – only on very special occasions – so I passed the 3.5 hour nonstop run through dark and dawn and rain and nothing reading a long and rather disappointing novel about metempsychosis, “The Bone Clocks” by David Mitchell. We slowed to safely pass trucks, buses and beautiful, idiotic guanacos, ambling the way tourists do. I find it impossible to care about characters who have been born again and again, and more importantly, they are not all that interesting. They have a lot of wisdom, which makes you less interesting. They are awful history bores. They lack urgency. Immortal, or even very long-lived, characters don’t do it for me. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that immortality really buggers fiction. Unless you were born that way, i.e. a god. Even then – not too many gods in modern fiction.

I pissed again and sat for a while having ham and cheese toasties and espressos at the airport. One more slash and it was boarding time. This boarding was not competitive at all. Without even exerting myself I boarded third or fourth.

In Buenos Aires I ate a little pizza with genuine slices of tomato on top and drank three minibottles, i.e. glasses, of wine. In between I went for a walk around the miniscule terminal area, eyes glazed over, hair thrust up into a breaker at the front from the blindfold used on the first flight. I thought about writing this blog entry, but decided it would be a waste of time that I could better spend pissing and reading the novel by David Mitchell. I was very impressed by the lack of annoying twats in the place – no one was using a screen loudly.

The next flight was GOL (caps?), which is very much slumming it compared to Aerolineas, and I was in the thick of the plebs, who were almost all speaking barbaric Brazilian Portuguese. The air was thick with uzh and vzh and dzisch sounds, like a Politburo meeting with enforced borscht. I dropped off for a while and had a nice dream about my wife. Not sexy, but still quite satisfying. The dream, not my wife, who is of course both. I awoke just in time to frown at everyone for not returning their seats to the upright position quickly enough.

Immigration was a piece of piss – it’s always easier to enter a country you don’t live in, in my experience – and I reached up to my left ear to pull the lever that changes my language from Spanish to Portuguese. Sometimes I forget to engage the clutch and the lever gets stuck halfway and this accounts for the so-called creole Portuñol. But this time the clutch engaged well. So I did a fistpump for everyone to see.

After a certain amount of farting around, another flight. Awful, a little person in seat A of row next to me (seat D) with a very loud voice talking to the fellow in C over the poor woman in B. That whiny strain of Portuguese that always agitates me. But very short (flight I mean) and then a flawless piss, bag-retrieval, and taxi ride with wheel change (can I help? no, quicker if you stay there) and here we are. So there you go. Tomorrow I buy nail clippers, to clip my nails with, because my nails are growing inexorably. I may also jog along to Pampulha Lake and have a look for these alligators that people have been telling me about. Apparently there is a substantial alligator tribe in Pampulha but they do not attack humans. I am a human, so I will be OK – no reason why I shouldn’t be their best pal.