A horrible scorching smell, some intense crashing about with cookery impedimenta and WB has finally finished making his late dinner. Which leaves me a little space and calm in which to write, except that, to kill time until he handed me some peace and quiet in the kitchen, I've been sucking down beer and looking up music reviews, neither of which make a particularly homely nest for sobriety.
Hence, this is likely to err even more confusingly than my usual mishmash of gently-allied thinkulation.
So tonight's big question is why am I / slash / why do I feel bad about being ever so slightly incompetent and undermotivated at work? (For those of you not in the ken, I am, in fact, fond of my job in ways that I feel are threatening when I "raise" myself "above" it. For some reason, the lesser me thinks that, to be a real artist (to use Transvision Vamp's inflections), I have to somehow hate and transcend my day job, since it stands for all the things "real art" doesn't, such as being careful, being responsible, having discipline...)
This is not the question that I wish to address tonight. It is big enough to take care of itself. It is a Big Scaly Dragon Question, and the less I mess about with those, the better.
The other question, the one I will address right now, since it is safely irrelevant and has an astronomically high whingeability factor, is The Question of My Problem With People. As in, why am I Not Friendly?, or as I put it to the clever and equally-lost RW (may his tribe increase!), why, when I sit down at a table, does the conversation invariably stop altogether?
Well, there is the matter of commanding attenion. I'm not sure I have the healthiest historical models for dialectic. In conversation, (true to chiaroscuro form), I am either performer or audience member. Dialogue is completely out of the question until I get to know some other person's language intimately enough to get the timing right. As RW said to me, in response to my question, "there is [a sort of?] arrhythmia [sc. to my conversation]."
Which leaves the fine dramatic traditions of the monologue, conversation as commedia-dell'-arte, in which nobody really says anything because the characters can't change, the patter routine (...when you're as gay as I am, anybody can be your straight man...), and ... and ... and ...
Scripts! scripts, scripts, scripts. Wouldn't live without them (tennis ohne net, as RF would say), but I get the sense they don't do what I want them to, which is: empower me. Sure, once I get my teeth around somebody else's langage, but outside of those few rare and arduously-won friends, the canals of information exchange seem pretty silted up. Or, better, not yet dug.
All the better to think, my lovelies. The enormity, the complexity of my head-palazzo, the suites and suites en enfilade of ideas' halls, chambers, and cabinets of wonders, well, would they be as stately and aristocratic if I opened the doors for public viewing? Of course they would.
At the moment, y'all can attend my lev�e, discreetly watch me use the close stool, attend me at supper, spit in the corners. Like any number of the petty royals who infested my bless�d ironickal century, anybody (literate/rich/interested/bored enough) can build Versailleses all over the web, with ME ME ME dead-center, where the perspective suddenly makes sense.
Monday
Me.
Tuesday
Me.
...
And with megalomania like that, he wonders that nobody will talk to him?
Well-- it is surprising. I am (and this is not self-delusion) well-dressed, well-groomed, and physically attractive. I'm sorry, I can't help it.
(Yum-Yum: Can this be vanity? No, it is not vanity! Nature is beautiful and she revels in her beauty...)
As I was saying, I stick out in a crowd as worth-talking-to. And yet the beautiful people, my fellow gods and goddesses, keep holy distance. It might be a gesture of respect.
I could seem too self-sufficient. I am. I am an only child and it shows. When people offer me help, I usually decline.
Perhaps I put out intense shy-vibes, or untouchability-vibes, or something of that sort, but I can't imagine that fends off the insensible. They, at least, would come up and say hi.
But No!
The real reason is that I speak in a completely indecipherable language, have an iridescent glass bubble, invisible to me, around my head at all times, and I have twenty-three fawn-colored velvet tentacles instead of legs. Even I can't carry off that level of incredibility and still come off as a human being.
My tentacles and I are going to retire to the bath with "a postmodern beach-read" and contemplate the transmogrification of worlds. Anybody who wishes to soap my back up and feed me grapes is welcome to join.
But knock first, please.
love for three oranges,
a