Musings on Tuesday and notes found hiding, in no particular order:
1) There's a house up the top of the hill with what the owners probably consider the world's most perfect lawn. I find it frightening. I skirted it, though I'd tramped across countless other lawns on my meanderings, because it was too unnatural to set foot upon. If a lawn could be a skinhead, this one would have a swastika tattoo and fuck-you boots. It was a bare fuzz, trimmed penal-code short. Like moss. Like it was fake. It bothered me, long after I'd moved on into greener, as it were, pastures.
2) Two grown men, opening a box post-marked, not gift-wrapped. Leaning forward, Christmas-eager, as they pull out silver static-wrapped packages. Glossy manuals, clear-windowed bills. Then a sip of coffee, and return to business, a man with a tie and no Santa-wish.
But I know, I saw, and it made me smile, and think, for two seconds, that maybe there's hope for humans after all.
3) Eating donuts (I swear, the little place in the Gladstone mall makes the best donuts in existence; nothing else even comes close) and staring blindly at the baby-photo stall, where a bored girl waits for even more bored mothers to bring their darlings to be turned into starlets for the time it takes to pose for a photo. There's a scary photo that looks like a toddler mugging a baby, but N points a little further along, to a blond cherub clutching a football, wearing a jersey.
"That's the most frightening one," she says. "The kid has a jersey. That's scary. And they'll probably expect him to live up to it. Like most Gladstone boys."
"And like most Gladstone boys," I replied, "he probably will. And then some girl, like most Gladstone girls, will marry him, and they'll produce something just like he was, and get a photo just like that taken. And the jersey is the scary part of that photo?"
"It's what it symbolises."
Sage nod. Dispose of cinnamoned bag and fight the urge to buy a pen to correct the horrendous grammar of the mall managers on a public sign. If I go on a killing spree, you'll know the reason. Someone's left an apostrophe out of a sign again. A girl can only take so much, after all.
9:33 PM - link to this -
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Monday, July 02, 2001
OK, so sometimes (a lot of the time) staying at my parents' place drives me nuts. The town is small, there's few of my friends left here, there's nothing to do. There's pay-by-the-hour access which is giving me withdrawal symptoms because I am the Net Vampire. But this having nothing to do thing is sometimes a great relief. Like it is now. This is, in essence, the holiday from life that I've been craving for so long. I can play Merchant Prince all day, if I like. I can lie back and read, and when I can't keep my eyes open, I can nap for three hours, and not wake up in a mad panic. I can spend half an hour just playing with the cat.
Under all this relaxation, I can literally feel my energy being returned. For the first time in months, I'm starting to get inspired to write again.
And I will write today.
By all the Stanleys dead and gone, I swear it. (5 points)
10:12 AM - link to this -
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