Water and Work

Too many nights in bars, I think.  I am beginning to lose memory rather than making memories.  I must get back to work.  Not at the factory, of course, but working at making meaning.  There are many ways of doing that.  You have to choose.  You don't have to.  I mean, you can just go along and see what happens. 

Bar night Friday with a friend, a serious art collector, traveller, and raconteur.  Sipping cocktails and swapping tales. 

"People reach a certain age, and suddenly they start talking in serious tones about what they will leave behind.  I'm not worried about what I am leaving behind.  I have three sons.  I guess I'll leave that.  But the rest of it. . . ." 

I think he was talking about people trying to build dynasties, of material things.  At least that is how I took it.  Like leaving the name Hilton, perhaps, not necessarily Paris. 

The rest of the evening became vague.  And Saturday was a miss.  Things were beautiful, but not that beautiful.  I know you can't relive something. . . I know that well.  It is a mantra of mine.  But desire clouds your vision.  I went for that perfect pig sandwich again at the little hipster pig place.  I ordered my sandwich and a beer and sat in the courtyard with my camera.  The waitress came out to tell me they were out of pork.  Out of pork!  It is a restaurant that serves pork.  WTF?  In the end, they scraped some pork scraps and mixed it with bbq chicken and sausage and made me a sandwich.  It wasn't very good.  Still, there was beer and cool sun and the camera that I didn't use. 

And that is the point.  I wasn't making anything meaningful. 

I got a text from C.C.  He was taking his wife for a cocktail at my favorite bar only minutes from my house.  I joined them.  They have been married for something like thirty years.  He will retire soon, and they want to travel, return to Paris, etc.  C.C. is a good sounding board for me, so I told him about reading the Norton Anthology of Religions and wondered why I could not believe in God but still be a fool about love.  I'd been thinking, I said, that the two must come from the same place, the same sort of instinct.  They are both faith based on some feeling about something goofy.  I've fallen in love my whole life, I said.  Why?  It is Jesus Christ stupid.  Both religion and love are supported by icons and books about how sad life is and about the succor to be found.  Religion, at least, has an organization.  It is systematized.  And there are lots of other people to share with.  Love seems random and chaotic, and all the literature around it is about how it fails.  Nobody wants to read a book about a happy couple.  But I was sitting with one.  They would go home together and watch a movie together and put one another to bed and dream of trips to Kyoto and Brussels and Paris, etc. 

And the rest of the night is a blur.  I remember going to the studio to look for something and putzing around there, finding the big bottle of vodka, of course, of talking to people from my loading dock as they walked to and from the bars and restaurants that surround me, of standing at the bar of the price fixe restaurant and wondering if the two girls who kept looking at me were staring in amusement or horror but preferring to think that they were feeling the first pangs of love.  Somewhere in the middle of the night, I was standing in an empty Pita Pit.  Strangely empty and weird before two fellows walked out from the back.  I don't know how to order in such places very well, so when asked, I simply said, "Put everything on it."  "Everything?"  "Sure."  I leaned against the dirty high topped table to steady myself when a policeman walked in.  I grabbed my sandwich and bolted thinking that somehow we might have an unpleasant exchange that would not work out in my favor. 

I must have eaten the sandwich.  It is not lying around the house anywhere as far as I can tell. 

Waking at four, mouth a sand trap.  Two big glasses of water and back to bed for some crazy thought/dreams.  Most of it was about things I needed to do, about things I have not done.  A lot of it was about photos I had not taken, stories I was not writing.  Why is the dark so dark?  Getting up at six to find I was out of coffee, driving to the Starbucks on the Boulevard which was unbelievably open.  My voice sounded terrible.  Coming home to make the coffee and finding that I was almost out of milk.  Shit fuck piss goddamn.  The interior of the house eventually becoming visible.  What a mess.  I like to think it is metaphorical, though, you know--a beautiful, ramshackle of a wonderful mess, all the perfect parts cluttered and bumped out of place, a symbol like Maison Vauquer in "Le Père Goriot" or Balzac's house itself, an emblem of the owner, like the Grierson place in "A Rose for Emily." 

I do remember texting with Q about how get my phone, iPad, and computer all in synch again.  And now they are.  From now on I will call him iQ.  I sent him today's photo.  He cropped it and sent it back. 

It came to all my devices.  I am in touch with the world and myself again.  It is a start. 

Onward.  There are mundane tasks to be done before I can get to anything more profound.  And there is a dinner to cook tonight for my mother. 

Water and work.  That is my new mantra.