YZ just disappeared. As did the entry I was just working on about him (I tried to increase the font size in the composition window and d'oh lost all my typage in a keystroke.
I think it was something I said, in particular, I think it had something to do with asking him to a movie. Aargh.
Cut to footage of AT, in a darkened room with a dozen shitty little monitors, reviewing dozens and dozens of teen movies. He is swotting up for an advanced seminar in Remedial Applied Romantics. Something swelling swells on the soundtrack. Perhaps it's Simple Minds. Perhaps it's Elgar. Whatever. How, he asks himself in an echoing voice-over, can otherwise ordinary human beings -- just like me, he thinks, -- mysteriously ask one another out and have a good time?
"It's a good question!" says a figure in a white lab coat. AT looks around to find that his personal mythologies are being played out in dumb show through a mystical transmutation of the video for "She Blinded Me With Science". Is that an electric mosquito in my ear?
AT and TD stroll through a leafy asylum garden, commenting quietly on the rhododendra, and TD tells AT a myth about the origin of language, which AT can't recall right now, but seemed to make sense at the time. TD urges AT to dance. AT points out that he is already dancing, but TD very suddenly knocks him into a nearby wheelbarrow and says, "Drink your milk! Drink your milk."
AT draws conclusions. In black lipstick. All over his sheets, like Leibniz making equations in bed. [footnote: other peope procreate, recreate or somnulate in bed -- why not equate?] It si something in the way I move, I think. Little s/zaps of power shoot from my eyes. For some reason, my radiotransmitter says, "Here be dragons", which is brutally honest but not really fair to me or anybody who just wants to chat.
If only, says the great god TD, now brandishing an undertaker's umbrella aloft in a rainstorm, if only you could Harness that Power for the Good Of Mankind!
AT's eyes narrow a bit as he realises that consorting with deities ultimately results in swallowing a lot of horseshit, and, while patting one's mouth daintily with a damask cloth, remarking, "Oh, how lovely! Thank you!" But gods, like your other friends, are very flashy and important creatures, and have to be humored from time to time.
TD, helpfully, whispers something about some sort of French, or is it Greek, drug, or is it a poison? and then AT suddenly develops cold feet.
At this point, there is a commercial break, wherein a celebrity impersonator impersonating AT tries to convince a person sitting in the glow of a personal computer to see a movie called "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and read a book called "Personal Pleasures" by Rose Macaulay. AT dreams at the laundromat, when he shuts his eyes, that he lives in a more civilized age, wherein his laundry is done for him and his rooms cleaned up, and the Bohemian crystal brandy decanter on the sideboard is always three-quarters full. He stretches morocco-slippered feet across the Turkey carpet like the sun setting on a vast empire and lights a small and fragrant cigarette. As he stares into the dying fire, he dreams about a fantastical place where people interact quickly and fanatically, where images come instantaneous and too bright to take in, and where the sense of being confused and lost is the only leveller that brings people together. Another drag on the exquisite cigarette. Perhaps later tonight, he will write a journal entry about it.