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manja
Sunday, September 19 1999
Yesterday I was walking Sophie and evidently stepped on a piece of glass in the alleyway that runs between Cape May and Brighton Avenues northwest of Cable. By this morning it was causing a pain that seemed so internal that I was misdiagnosing it as a fracture in my heel bone. But I'm no doctor.
And when I went to look at it, sure enough there was an entry wound. Assuming a rather strange pretzel-like posture, I attacked the wound with a pair of needle-nozed tweezers. Eventually I could see a face of the glass glinting its evil presence amongst the bloodied tissue I was tearing aside. Every time the tweezers scraped the surface of the intruder, it felt as rough and obdurate as the Matterhorn. Kim came up to me during this critical stage, saying "hey Gus" in her most kittenish voice to quiz me whether or not I really still loved her, but I had to shoo her away for fear I would do myself an injury. When I finally had the piece of glass dislodged, I held it between my fingers awaiting Kim's return from walking it Sophie. It was a perfect little diamond-clear Indian arrowhead, two and a half millimeters on its longest dimension. Its only lasting legacy was a strained, weary feeling in my 31 year old leg joints from the contortionist posture I'd assumed to remove it.
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It's not even like I'm taking the shits anymore; it's more like the shits are taking me.
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Rory is back from his experience in the land of woo-woo mystical mumbo jumbo, kicking that slacking hippie friend of his out from behind the wheel of his journal.
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In the evening, I cooked up a mushroom-garlic spaghetti concoction, which I served along side some purportedly endangered sea bass whipped up by Lori and Lisa next door. Dinner was all ready for eating by the time Kim came home in the middle of a hilarious rerun of Futurama, the one where our heroes venture to a hostile robot planet to deliver a much-needed box of lugnuts. I was in a silly mood as I slung the food around, using a faux-Italian accent and urging people to "manja!"
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After the girls went home, I was hanging out with Kim and sipping Jim Beam on the rocks (after almost two years, I've actually become rather tired of vodkatea). I was in a strangely futurist mindset, talking about what would happen when the day finally comes in which everyone could carry all the information they'd accumulated during their lives (including books, personal data, phone & email lists, movies, CDs & software, possibly even the contents of their DNA and even the wiring of their brains) on small personal devices. In fact, I said, such information would be like a digital analogue of personal DNA: uniquely fragile on its own but still insured by the sheer number of recombined copies on other such machines as well as the internet. When that day comes, we'll find ourselves swapping experiences with people via infra-red beams, the electronic analogue of sex. In a usual late-night drunken way, I was all worked up about this stuff, my mind working faster than my ability to articulate it all. But, as if to throw a wet blanket over my exhuberance, Kim said she didn't see how such developments could ever apply to the vast bulk of people, those who aren't especially interested in consuming and creating data.
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