THE GREAT GADFLY:

Today I Wade In The Stream Of Consciousness And There's Nothing That You Can Do To Stop Me



Fuck your head! Throw it away! were the words I was reading on the train this morning, reading and re-reading, in the book I've been muddling through. I read very slowly. I think the idea is for me to be a quick reader, being that I'm a fancypants writer type and I don't have any recognizeable learning disorders or even a hint of blurred eyesight. People I know can just blur through a book as if the pages were printed on hummingbird wings. BRRRRRRRT! "Done!" Eh? What? "I ripped through that book in two hours," they say. Huh? No! Don't do that! I want to volley back. I take pride in reading slowly. I like to meditate on phrases I like or don't understand at first glance. I like to go back a couple of pages when I catch myself losing focus and letting my mind wander: ...and then he took out the rifle and got naked andhmmmiwonderifiwillhavetheenergytodoaloadoflaundry
afterworkandohgodineedanewjobsobadandeverydaygetsmoreandmoredesperateandineedtolisten
tothatnewpetergabrielalbummoreoftenbecauseithinkit'sbetterthanigiveitcreditandthe coroner dropped a dirty towel over his cold, dead groin and said, "now the secret is revealed." THE END.

I think if a writer can spend months or years creating a book, I can give them three weeks to really digest the end results of their labor. Yeah. Three weeks is how long I usually take to slog through a book. I can only read while in transit lately, or when I'm in a strange place like a bank or a doctor's office, waiting to meet with someone. I can't read at home, unless it's a magazine article or an essay or something really, really short. I can't make myself go to a cafe or a diner to read, because then I get caught up in observing other people and eventually I care more about eating than I do about reading, and then after I gorge, I just wanna go home and fall into my bed and rub my fat belly until I pass out.

So this morning. The train. Fuck your head! Throw it away! The train was crowded. I was standing near the door and holding on to a metal handrail bolted into the wall of the train. I hate reading a book while standing up, but lately my train seat karma has been hopelessly poor, and I realized I needed to suck it up or it could be possible that I'd never read a book again. I was meditating on the words "fuck your head" and contemplating its mantra-like, affirmative properties, and next thing I knew, I felt a warm, dry hand wrapped around my own. The movement was awkward and staccato, like when you're fumbling for keys.

It was just some schmoe reaching out for something to grab on to while at the same time trying to read his paper and stand in a crowded train at the same time. He snapped his hand away as if my skin were poisonous radiation-soaked hot coal, said a quiet "sorry" and that was that.

Stopping in for my morning on-the-way-to-work coffee, bodies buzzed around like a crackhouse orgy and I wished that people's cellphones were actually remote controls that you could use to manipulate their movements, and that I had an old-fashioned big black metal box with a giant clowny joystick at which I could tug and pull and divide people like the red sea so I could just get to the goddamn half and half in peace and go on about my way.

A beautiful person sits in this coffee place every morning. How can he not be noticed? He looks like he's been dipped in lemon icing, then clad in Ken doll clothes circa 1973. He sits there reading his Bible, every morning. This morning a table of young, kind of unsettlingly Lynchian youths barked at the Lemon Boy, "HEY! Do you have cream cheese?" to which the Lemon Boy replied, "yeah, I do. Do you need some? For a bagel?" The exchange seemed packed with ambiguous subtext, like an Ianesco play. Then, I think I've learned over the years to repurpose the painstakingly banal as bizarre, mainly for entertainment purposes. I've learned to keep this lens to myself, for fear of coming off like some toothless acid casualty, cackling away over ironies that don't translate.

This morning I felt like a rubber band had snapped in civilization, that walls had been toppled, that the floodgates were open, that someone slipped some meth in the Lemming Chow, that everyone around me was an insectoid ambulatory wildcard, bouncing off bumpers and rambling about purposelessly with a poker face of steely determination. Then I realized, nah, it's not them. It's just me.

I work with an unapologetically slow woman, who I bumped into walking to work this morning. This woman, I swear, she's at least ten years younger than me, and her pace of life is at least ten times slower. It would be maddening if she weren't so damn happy about it. She's a role model for slowness. Uncarved block. Tao of Pooh. Zen and the Art of, oh whatever. You get it. She often talks about how slow she is, and how proud she is of being slow. I think she wants me to slow down. Telling her I lived in New York for six years would make no difference to her. Slow Is The Way, and that's all there is to it.

I should tell her I read slow. That might gain me some slowboy cred. Maybe a big group of us people who do things faster than we like should band together and make a subcultural movement out of slowing it down. The Slow Movement. Get it? Slow Movement? We'll listen to bands that only play slow music and we'll quit going to fast food places and we'll eschew anything modern that was created to save time. It'll be like going Amish, only you're allowed to have tattoos and sex.

Last night at 5pm, it was pitch black dark. I did not respond well to this. I told my slow co-worker friend this morning, "yesterday I was useless." She laughed. "Useless? Well, I've never heard it put that way before."


2003-10-14 - Last Haiku
2003-10-09 - Don't Cry Out Loud
2003-10-09 - Sit Down, You're Making Me Nervous
2003-10-08 - I'm Sure Miss Thing, I'm Sure
2003-10-07 - Carbonated Water, Caramel Color, Aspartame

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