1001
Open the black square. Screen wakes up. Read your name, date, time. Here we are, this is you.
Look at the weird picture Window’s magical draw lottery has chosen for you today for your ‘welcome screen’. Savannah with what? Wildebeests. Feel like you have a life for a few seconds. You could have a life, out there, like these beautiful animals in this glorious BBC Planet Earth grade nature. Briefly try to remember the sound of David Attenborough’s voice and how it would feel if he started narrating your life, how you are a beautiful but endangered creature. How you hunt and mate, your cute pups. Territorial fights. The tragic ending with a cautionary message, emotional music, thank you, thank you, next creature.
Type password. Enter your real life. Close all the work windows and imagine they were people. Plup plup plup. Think about where the little ‘x’ would be if you could do that in real life. Pulling the left ear for close, right ear to minimise? Turn them into tiny versions. If so, would there be different sizes for different ranks, like an actual hierarchy? Standing on the shoulders of giants, etc. but probably, the more important you are, the smaller you would be and the faster you would move, and ideally you would be in two places at the same time. Thinking about all the emails as mind clutter, sand of your brain, that has washed ashore in many places, slowly carving out shapes in ancient rocks or filling up the filter, causing virtual containers to overflow.
Scrunching your moist hair, waiting for curls. Wondering why cool moisture always feels like a blue shadow on a cliff. Remembering the seaside, realising you could probably count all the days you have ever spent in France near the sea. How limiting the number seems compared to the images and memories. How days are a strange way of counting life as an experience. How perception and association can morph everything into smaller and bigger shapes and then you pickle it in your memory stash (which unfortunately is very disorganised and magically rotten, so you will only find them when you least expect it and have a lot in your view which you might not need right now). How you once new a lot about neurology and memory and how this all is stored in these cupboards too, somewhere.
Oh, kitchen. People. Food. Noise, ok maybe this is life then? Itchy contact lenses, shivers on the legs. Lots of attention on the legs today downtown. Not even great legs. Just legs, everyone so desperate these days. Commenting on the conversation, wondering if this means being distracted or inspired. And why make that a dichotomy again? Laughing at some jokes, feeling part of the fun. Oki doki. Garlic in the pan starts to smell good. Been given a beer. The body lotion smells nice too. You smell like an orange joghurt. Blood orange. Bloody Hell. Cillian Murphy on BBC6 is obnoxiously rubbing his eclectic music taste into your ear, cushioning the disaster with his soft voice.
Remembering that dream once, about your mother, dead, saved in a cloud on your phone. How you realised it’s not that far from the truth – her becoming a voice in your ear more than a real person, being so far away. How life moves in ways that float people away and closer to each other on invisible streams. How you’ve always decided to float further away, in the hope of peeking over the edge one day, to find the curtain and pull it to find your – just killed Cillian. Cut him short, with the off-button. He’s from 2019 anyway, that stuff is all recorded.
Brushing against the impatience again. If this feeling was a person, what would it look like? Would you get on? Do you get on too well already? Will she turn into patience like a SailorMoon transformation or be replaced? (Is this again the attempt to make everything into a range where you stand with your little lever, moving the zuuuup zoooop (usually my brain is much more focused (I’m just trying to meditate here (taking every thought and (Letting it go))).
Ok, just lost 20 minutes to the real flow of time, interacting with real people doing physical things that will not last and are hardly worth remembering, because of their repetitive nature and the way how these aspects will be integrated into the larger picture, the idea or concept of everyone and everything and this moment in time, this idea of friendship, of shared experience, of human nature, of life before and after (thinking about all the people who died and the pile of horrible thought pieces that will be written, have already been written, about the pandemic and how sad it is that neither of these aspects matter, really. Both just accumulated natural cycles, aggregated around this common topic that lends them meaning for this moment in time, but only in a relational way, not with any true depth or creativity).
Food is almost ready. We are 200 words away from the end.
Where is this all going? Today was a lazy experiment of possible pathways, associations, no plan, no judgement, no edits, just life as it is thrown in my face (or lap? Is that more feminine and if yes, why?). The primordial soup of background noise, like disaster debris flooding the streets of my resort town and sometimes you recognise something that might have had meaning in a previous life, might be valuable or at least worthy of rescue. Also lots of tiny deaths and thoughts ground to small particles that have become unrecognisable pulp over the years. I once worked on the ‘granola problem’ in high school – how to undo the problem of the big bits floating on top. Let’s see what comes up. Now we pickle this and see what a night of sleep does to the petri dishes in my head, what will develop.