Secret Pop

Jun 2, 2003

Oh, my aching back, and other exclamations of misery and discontentment for want of pity and relief.

I have objections to it always getting to be so late so quickly. And to watching television programming that brings tears to my eyes when I've got so much work to do. I just end up sitting in front of the computer -- eyes burning -- resenting that I taxed my eyes at all to begin with and knowing that I'm going to end up wearing some very unsatisfying corrective eyewear one day soon. And I'll deserve ever cursed moment of it. I treat my eyes like vermin, and they're beginning to get wise.

Here is something I wrote down a while back. It is a list of retorts made by a character in A Confederacy of Dunces. I was entertained by them and caught myself hoping that, one day, I might be able to have a dialogue with someone wherein I got to say these very words in this very order, sandwiched by the disagreeable responses of my discussion partner, who would be none the wiser and would likely find me hateful and difficult in a miscreant sort of way. Here they are, though, in their original order:

What am I seeing? Tell me soon or I'll die.

You really are insane, aren't you?

Are you kidding?

Get with it, please.

Oh, you really are on the moon.

Oh, you're truly fantastic.

Where will you ever end?


Marvelous! I can't wait to disagree with someone! How pithy I will get to pretend to be for a few sentences! Coincidentally, the dialogue I dream about is actually the construct of an improv game we do at the theater called "Pick a Play," but I'm sure I'll never get to say these things on stage, because we don't have A Confederacy of Dunces in the ratty old bag filled with dirty, spider-infested scripts and plays and restaurant menus that we use as fodder when the game gets played. Which is probably a good thing, because a lot of that book is not funny to me at all, much to the chagrin of many of my peers. I didn't dislike the book. But I was bewildered by the number of people who described it to me as the funniest book they had ever read. Please. This just wasn't at all my experience.

Anyway, the point of this was originally that it's late, and I'm tired, and it always seems to be late, and I always seem to be tired. And my back really does ache from the curvature it adopts when I work. I don't believe in catching up on lost sleep. But there are times when I wish I did.

In the absence of any sort of segue, here is another photo from last night. I like it, despite the fact that it makes me look sort of scary and insane.


No comments: