I’m currently drunkenly balancing a Cornetto in my mouth as I finger-type. I’ve just walked home from a two-bottles-of-wine Nepalese dinner with Joy Division in my ears. I somehow found myself staring through a real estate window on Cleveland St at a fish tank with nine giant orange-and-silver carp floating around, chasing each other’s tales. The tank must have consumed a third of the space – all I could think of was the realtor sitting in his big black swivel-chair, alone in his glass-fronted office, naming his nine fish.
I’ve realised star-jasmine smells like the taste of custard.
My Cornetto is melting out of my mouth.
Previous to the Joy of Division I had Arcade Fire rambling as I rambled past the ‘natural meadow’ that is being cultivated in Prince Alfred Park. Often I feel like Arcade Fire is a gold hand that dips inside your chest and lifts you up by the sternum, just an inch off the ground. I locked eyes with a Chinese woman who was power-walking very slowly and by swivel-pointing to watch her disappear into the park-blackness I was caught by the cut-out moon. It was almost perverse how low it sat in the sky, how within reach and yellow-bright it hung.
I saw Wren today. If you go back to the beginning of this blog you will meet Wren, who was this stunning blue-jay of a girl who loudly declared to our Lit Theory class that she might stray off topic because she had been responsible for her organising her father’s funeral earlier in the semester.
She spoke of her inability to keep this event to herself, how the word-vomit would escape her with every new face she met.
And I saw her again, today, sitting alone at Michel’s Patisserie in Broadway.
This theory is un-investigated but I’m pretty sure that you will puncture a hot-bed of humanity at any one of these whipped-cream-pastry outlets.
This is also un-investigated but I think this might be particularly true of the Patisserie located on the ground floor of Broadway Shopping Centre. It has a small cafe area attached where there are grouped, like a small cattle-herd, a dozen or so tables and two large brown plastic-hard sofas.
It’s like a greater being shook a Boggle-set of human variation and let it fall into this space.
There’s the old lady whose skin seems to be trying to loosen itself from her jaw. She only wears silver.
There’s the old man who smells like neglect – I think he’s OK, though, because he has a shiny-bright Sheriff’s badge always pinned to his leather vest.
There’s the young Chinese woman who breastfeeds her baby whilst her mother holds up a jumper to screen her with one hand and eats chocolate cake with the other.
And, today, there was Wren. And she looked sad.
“Any human face is a claim on you because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and the loneliness of it.” (Gilead, Marilynne Robinson)
vimh 