we did bogart and bacall, but now the spotlight's gone
First of all, further to yesterday's post, be reassured: the middle-class guilt is now back in force.
It's windy and wild in London tonight, kids. I'm glad of it. The disjunction between all that sunshine and my internal predicament was getting a little too much. And so I say with Gerald Manley Hopkins:
"What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wet and wildness;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."
I had to go around to my dad's tonight because I needed to borrow an alarm clock (there is nowhere in Holborn where you can buy one, can you believe that?). He nagged me about tax and gave me a badge that said, "Same shit different day". Then I helped him and Claire choose paint colours for their new house. Deflating, hmm? Back in the day I would have broken down in tears the second I saw him, screamed and fought. But ... older now, craven, the wise imitator. Honesty makes no difference in the long run, and it hurts. Nothing impacts on the dull procession of days. Nothing can. Life goes on. So pretend, and choose the loveliest colours you can find.
I was smoking a cigarette outside work today, sitting on a wall I like, and an old woman came up to me, gave me a hug and said, "Cheer up, dear. It can't be that bad. And tomorrow is another day."
I was slightly puzzled at the time, because I wasn't even thinking of my life or other miserable things but rather having an idle and not unhappy daydream about Rufus Wainwright. Clearly something about me just betokens depression. I asked Liza, and she said that my body language speaks of unhappiness. Then she reminded me of something she's said to me before; that regardless of all that, whenever she thinks of me, she sees me in her mind's eye laughing.
So that was two pieces of unlooked-for sweetness, one from a stranger and one from my best friend, on a day in which I expected no such thing. I just wish I'd been something other than unmoved by both.
Come back and haunt me, follow me home, give me a motive, swallow me whole.