07-15-2011, 01:48 PM
Cheap bread always looks and smells nicer than the better brands. I'd bought my groceries that morning while not quite sure if the seat of my trousers was covered in shit stains. I'd had to leave my hat at home after remembering I'd wiped myself off with it a few nights ago. I'd put it in the wash and as I wandered the aisles with my small black basket I thought about it going round and round in the machine. It was good to know I still had some standards. I took a mild pleasure in looking so unkempt - my filthy shirt covered in crumbs, my zipless coat in dandruff, my trousers possibly in shit - as the sliding door opened and I took my basket. This was the dream. I was a dirty stinking bastard who lived in squalor listening to Leonard Cohen music under a blanket on the couch, reading books with the fan on full blast. Of course I've never drunk or smoked, but I think my homosexuality compensates for that. Of course I'm also mentally ill, but everyone's mentally ill these days. Housewives on valium because their couches don't match their drapes, lowlifes hanging from shower rails because they're late on the rent.
I started loading my basket. Orange juice, chilli con carne mix, kidney beans, chopped tomatoes, onions, rice, the cheap bread, and a strawberry cheesecake. That morning my father had left for a long weekend with two work mates. I'd been up reading at 4:00am when he came downstairs, packed his things, whined at me about a child's Chinese fan I'd broken by jiggling the nail loose (I lied and told him it was an accident, then thought about how hard done by I am), then watched a news report about the problem of rape in a country neither of us cared about, and simply thought of as a place where coloured people live. I got up and opened the door each time for both of his friends when they arrived. I thought it strange they both knocked so quietly, so I only just heard them, and my dad not at all. I wondered if they were afraid of him. One was very overweight and wore a dirty yellow shirt. He had big glasses which reminded me of Dennis Nielsen's. His face did as well, except pudgier. If Dennis had put down the hacksaw, found a nice girl to straighten him out and worked a menial job for the rest of his life, I suppose he'd look my father's friend. The other man was tall with leathery skin and a lot of white facial hair. He wore a cap and t-shirt and looked like an ex-biker, the kind who spend their youth rebelling and their old age telling stories about that rebellion. They left. I thought about beginning my four days of squalor, turning the air conditioner on fall blast and raiding the fridge, though of course my father returned for a bottle of water. I'd learned about such things as a child sneaking biscuits when he left for the shops.
Once I'd finished selecting my food, using the thirty pounds I was supposed to give my therapist yesterday for an appointment I was too tired to keep, I laid the basket on the counter and inwardly cringed as the woman behind the till asked if I needed a bag. I thought of a comedy sketch I'd seen years ago where an old woman is asked by a clerk at a pound shop if she needs a bag, and the old woman responds "where do you think I'm gonna carry 'em? On me 'ead?" The woman asked if I needed another bag. I did. They were surprisingly light. Small mercies. I carried them home. Cars went back and forth now and then and people walked by saying things. I thought about everything that might be being said in my current radius at this exact moment, and it was like watching twenty different plays on the same stage. People are always saying something, doing something. It depresses me, scares me, as though all the reality might make me unreal. All the different strands of life cancelling out my own.
When I arrived home I put the groceries away after a period of walking around turning things on and off again. Maybe I was being cancelled out. Maybe my life was being reduced to isolated fragments of action while Mrs. Jones down the road talked about her bunions and Mr. Harris up the street beat his wife.
I stacked the cheesecake and the minced beef on top of each other in the bottom freezer draw. Later I thought about them waiting there for the time of preparation and consumption, like a To Do List. I took down my stereo and a selection of my favourite CDs - Nirvana, Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan - and propped them in a corner of the sofa, then arranged a couple of cushions and threw my blanket over it all, my books on the armrest where my head would soon be. I listened to the first CD in a Leonard Cohen Greatest Hits album, singing along to "The Stranger Song" and "So Long, Marianne" while reading the rest of Women by Charles Bukowski, the same book I'd been reading at 4:00am. Later I would start on Factotum, though at the time I thought it would be The Most Beautiful Woman in Town. After a while I gave up, turned over and fell asleep, my feet kicking the buttons and the volume knob on the stereo as I tossed and turned. At one point, half awake, I heard a song by Cohen from recent years, his voice craggy yet infected with an obscene optimism which jarred against the cragginess. It was terrible, like listening to a demon torment an aborted child in hell, and in my half-awake state that's what I thought it was.
I woke up around 8:00pm. For some insane reason the made me happy. Now began the struggle between good and evil: watch the evening Friends repeats, or read the rest of my book. Good won out this time and I made it to the end, setting the novel down with triumph.
I made myself dinner. It was terrible. The meat was burned, the rice undercooked, the onions soggy and limp like wet paper. But still it tasted wonderful. Like something served at a gala banquet, with an old woman tapping a glass at the head of the table as the steam from each plate teases everyone's nostrils. Later I would eat the whole of the cheesecake then spoon the leftover beef into a sandwich made with the cheap bread. Before laying each slice down I’d hold it against my face and smell it. Cheap bread always looks and smells nicer than the better brands.
I started loading my basket. Orange juice, chilli con carne mix, kidney beans, chopped tomatoes, onions, rice, the cheap bread, and a strawberry cheesecake. That morning my father had left for a long weekend with two work mates. I'd been up reading at 4:00am when he came downstairs, packed his things, whined at me about a child's Chinese fan I'd broken by jiggling the nail loose (I lied and told him it was an accident, then thought about how hard done by I am), then watched a news report about the problem of rape in a country neither of us cared about, and simply thought of as a place where coloured people live. I got up and opened the door each time for both of his friends when they arrived. I thought it strange they both knocked so quietly, so I only just heard them, and my dad not at all. I wondered if they were afraid of him. One was very overweight and wore a dirty yellow shirt. He had big glasses which reminded me of Dennis Nielsen's. His face did as well, except pudgier. If Dennis had put down the hacksaw, found a nice girl to straighten him out and worked a menial job for the rest of his life, I suppose he'd look my father's friend. The other man was tall with leathery skin and a lot of white facial hair. He wore a cap and t-shirt and looked like an ex-biker, the kind who spend their youth rebelling and their old age telling stories about that rebellion. They left. I thought about beginning my four days of squalor, turning the air conditioner on fall blast and raiding the fridge, though of course my father returned for a bottle of water. I'd learned about such things as a child sneaking biscuits when he left for the shops.
Once I'd finished selecting my food, using the thirty pounds I was supposed to give my therapist yesterday for an appointment I was too tired to keep, I laid the basket on the counter and inwardly cringed as the woman behind the till asked if I needed a bag. I thought of a comedy sketch I'd seen years ago where an old woman is asked by a clerk at a pound shop if she needs a bag, and the old woman responds "where do you think I'm gonna carry 'em? On me 'ead?" The woman asked if I needed another bag. I did. They were surprisingly light. Small mercies. I carried them home. Cars went back and forth now and then and people walked by saying things. I thought about everything that might be being said in my current radius at this exact moment, and it was like watching twenty different plays on the same stage. People are always saying something, doing something. It depresses me, scares me, as though all the reality might make me unreal. All the different strands of life cancelling out my own.
When I arrived home I put the groceries away after a period of walking around turning things on and off again. Maybe I was being cancelled out. Maybe my life was being reduced to isolated fragments of action while Mrs. Jones down the road talked about her bunions and Mr. Harris up the street beat his wife.
I stacked the cheesecake and the minced beef on top of each other in the bottom freezer draw. Later I thought about them waiting there for the time of preparation and consumption, like a To Do List. I took down my stereo and a selection of my favourite CDs - Nirvana, Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan - and propped them in a corner of the sofa, then arranged a couple of cushions and threw my blanket over it all, my books on the armrest where my head would soon be. I listened to the first CD in a Leonard Cohen Greatest Hits album, singing along to "The Stranger Song" and "So Long, Marianne" while reading the rest of Women by Charles Bukowski, the same book I'd been reading at 4:00am. Later I would start on Factotum, though at the time I thought it would be The Most Beautiful Woman in Town. After a while I gave up, turned over and fell asleep, my feet kicking the buttons and the volume knob on the stereo as I tossed and turned. At one point, half awake, I heard a song by Cohen from recent years, his voice craggy yet infected with an obscene optimism which jarred against the cragginess. It was terrible, like listening to a demon torment an aborted child in hell, and in my half-awake state that's what I thought it was.
I woke up around 8:00pm. For some insane reason the made me happy. Now began the struggle between good and evil: watch the evening Friends repeats, or read the rest of my book. Good won out this time and I made it to the end, setting the novel down with triumph.
I made myself dinner. It was terrible. The meat was burned, the rice undercooked, the onions soggy and limp like wet paper. But still it tasted wonderful. Like something served at a gala banquet, with an old woman tapping a glass at the head of the table as the steam from each plate teases everyone's nostrils. Later I would eat the whole of the cheesecake then spoon the leftover beef into a sandwich made with the cheap bread. Before laying each slice down I’d hold it against my face and smell it. Cheap bread always looks and smells nicer than the better brands.
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe
all in all i found it to be a really enjoyable read, that interlaced sad with humour. 
i just felt i had to try and give a little constructive feedback