Winchester Sentences (Waking Up February 2007)

Way back in February, Oronte Churm, whose blog I follow (and doesn't it seem like all the best people are moving on from McSwenney's now?), posted a series of entries about Hemmingway. I happen to be exceedingly fond of Hemmingway (as a writer. Less so as a man.) In this entry, Churm talked about Hemmingway's Paris 1922 Sentences (which were in turn inspired by an exercize of Ezra Pound's) and challenged his readers to submit their own diciplined sentences. I didn't like anything that was submitted, including Churm's, but I wound up writing these. They're not great, but they capture that time well - I found them while going through an old notebook.

1. I have woken to women's voices in the kitchen, monday singing ghosts.

2. I have been asked through a closed bedroom door whether I battered Ciro, who lay naked and asleep beside me at four in the morning while police searched the origin of an anonymous phone call.

3. I have heard the roof pop as deck planks tense from the cold, resonant mariachi heel beats.

4. I have listened to Ciro dressing for work, sliding fabric and the jingle of a belt; he leaves thinking I am still asleep.

Bitter Cup, Soymilk, One Pump Vanilla

I'm at Starbucks, which I've started to think of as my office - in which context it doesn't seem like expensive coffee so much as very cheap rent. I get a lot more done here than at home. I even have coworkers. It's more than my third space - it is in fact my second space. (Third space = the internet?)

Everyone irritates me today, which doesn't seem like a Wednesday, for anyone who is counting. But I hate everyone here (except 2/3 of the bar staff and my coworker John) and find their conversations grating. There is a table of women upsetting me right now (the third table of upsetting women, as if they are doing it in shifts) because they laugh as though they are in a birth control commercial (or, possibly, an ad for tampons, pimple removers, or market-targeted brands of goes-on-clear women's deoderant). "Look at us all laughing conspiratorially" too-loud "ha ha ha." (Do you not agree that conspiracies are only admirable when they are sneaky rather than ostentatious?)

They are making fun of various guys they've broken up with after long-term relationships (usually live-in ones), and apparently it was at all times the guy's fault, the guy never saw the breakup coming, and the guy embarassed himself by acting nice and wanting to stay friends. Having never met these guys, whose fault it may indeed have been, I am sympathetic to them and hostile to the women, mainly because the women are completely without compassion for the men who wanted to love them. The guy already lost; he doesn't get to have you any more. Gloating about it is bad sportsmanship.

It all makes me very sad. I don't know why I'm writing about it.

I've been angry all day at the way so many members of my generation seem to have deserted science and technology and believe the only solution to the world's problems is a luddite one - a return to a fictional simpler time. It doesn't matter whether it's religious conservatives or pseudo-spiritual radical environmentalists (all of whom are Malthusians) - it seems technology is the enemy and the scientific method is not to be trusted. I don't know whether it's Y2K or the Challenger blowing up or just the nature of millenial freakouts and the inevitable conviction that the world will therefore end in our lifetimes.

I don't know how to write about my vacation in Dallas other than to say that I was glad to see everyone and I like how you've fixed up your places and I had a good time and I found the whole thing upsetting for many complicated reasons which couldn't be helped (which is in itself upsetting).

Other people that irritate me today:

-People who have hour-long conversations about who is hosting which network television game shows.

-People on first dates bragging too much about extreme sports and the difficulty of their college courses.

-Idiot teenagers having a spitting contest too near where I am sitting.

-Bloggers who talk about the golden era of culture, after which there have been no good movies, bands, actors, books, or poets. I don't care whether they are taking as their marker yesterday or last century.

-Mosquitoes. I know they're not people, but they count for the purposes of this list since they are carriers of parts of people, or rather parts of me, since I am the only one they ever seem to want to eat. For whatever reason, I'm more reactive to the mosquitoes up here, which is the last thing I needed; I can barely use my left wrist today because it was bitten yesterday. Which makes me feel lame in an emotional as well as a physical sense.

I hate this town. And in fact the world.