Reading Simic

Reading a $6 used copy of Charles Simic's The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs from Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights. The juice bar across the street where we once got an astounding slice of key lime cake is gone.

Excerpt:

My father and his best friend talking about how some people resemble animals. The birdlike wife of so and so, for example. The many breeds of dogs and their human look-alikes. The lady who is a cow. The widow next door who is a tigress, etc.

"And what about me?" says my father's friend.

"You look like a rat, Tony," he replies without a moment's hesitation, after which they just sit drinking without saying another word.

The Uniform

I came across a dead man in some sort of uniform and stripped him of his clothes for myself.

Most notable were the epaulets, which was a cross between a stripper’s waterfall shimmies and something a monkey would wear to solicit coins for its master. 

The cut of the jacket pleased me: It flattened my stomach and cinched my waist. The material was wool, possibly alpaca, softer in some quadrants and riddled down the front with brass buttons.

But  the trousers’ shapelessness troubled me; the pant bunched around my ankles like the sagging hoofs of a two-man horse suit. 

To ascertain what, if any level of regard my uniform would illicit from the public, I proceeded down a well-trammeled boulevard lined with peanut sellers and souvenir carts hawking  balloons and squeeze toys approximating the gutless cry of our most famous indigenous amphibian.

A man approached from the opposite direction. His eyes settled briefly on my person, then looked straight ahead past me, with the slightest realignment of his face and shoulders, as though he had  scanned the executive summary of a report on my kind. Even so, it was impossible to summon his judgment, so quickly had it flickered before indifference set in.

You can trust a child’s stare to communicate the truth of your effects.  On the subway, I caught three of them no higher than my knee eyeing me balefully, on the ledge of manners. When I wiggled my fingers at them I could tell that none wanted to be me.

13 Views of the Olympia Diner

"The Happiest Moment of My Life"

Reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence:

"In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come.

 "Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: if a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so."

Laffy Taffy Tanka

Sour cherry then

inside, candy sparkle gems.

You allow yourself  

no more than three treats a day.

Good things are quickly ruined.

Dream: The Envelope

I dream that I. calls a service to order a prostitute. When the prostitute arrives, I. tells her to sit in a chair and open her legs. A. leans over and began rummaging around her genitals, referring to them as an "envelope."

When I glance out the window, I see a middle-aged, balding voyeur with a pot belly look away quickly. He scribbles the words, "French Underwear" on a paper napkin, tips his head back and drapes the napkin across his face.

Later in the dream it becomes clear that the prostitute, whose eyes bulge slightly like Peter Lorre's, may in fact not be a woman, but a transvestite.

But if that is the case, A.'s use of the "envelope" metaphor would no longer make sense.