Waffles and guns

Does the memory of a dream have the right to be considered memory? Consider your repeated nightmares and the detail in which you remember these compared to the face of the clerk at the shop you visit in person several times in a week. What I remember best is the short, intensely relieved moment, in which I close the eyes that aren’t my eyes, and I am safe, because

this is a dream

Some like to experiment with lucidity: I do not. This is my review of the year that has passed: in this time, I have become inconsistent, my handwriting inhabited by at least three different shapes of an a. This is the work of lucidity. And January and its siblings wrapped themselves inside a sensible black coat, the inside lined with polkadots.

This is what the year has been. This is hardly obfuscation at work. This is a dream.

Forgive my forwardness - it is, after all, the season for such behaviour. I intend to present you with a list of wishes; directed at you, whoever you are, all of humanity, whoever finds him or herself in my vicinty; please:

Have some, if only minimal, grasp of the fundamentals of communication. Do not expect me to read minds, and do not sulk because I can’t.

Apologise where apologies are due.

Know the principles and workings of tact and common courtesy.

Do not cause your peers any inconvenience because of your own troubled conscience.

If you have a problem, either be willing and able to let it go, or state it, in plain words.

if you want to smile, smile.

Thank you. Next year, this despicable holiday is canceled, and no one shall gain the opportunity to bother any one with guilt-induced misery; and no one’s heads are to be burdened with anything heavier than hangovers.

Sometimes the paragraphs are lined up and connected: they support one another and make sense. And sometimes they don’t.

I wanted to say something about stories, and about me, and the people I spend time with. And who we think I am and what I think they are and why things are that way.

This is a memory:
A novel arrives in my mailbox, sent anonymously, but I know, without a doubt, who it’s from. And I can never read the tale again, or feel remotely similar to how I felt when I first sat down to read it, without at the same time recalling the words on the attached note, and the face of the one who wrote it.

This is another:
We had very little in common once the beer was gone, you and I, but there was this: ever so often we would rush to town together searching for the same book. Then we took it home with us; battled over who would get to read it first, or maybe if one could read while the other slept, and when I reached the end of the last chapter, I could rely on you: you would know when to light a cigarette for me, or you would roll about and hug me back, for no other reason than the excitement about the story. You understood that, and while I no longer particularly want to hug you, I am a bit sad that there was no one to replace you for those sort of moments.

And I find myself talking to someone new: I talk and talk until, quite suddenly, I do not talk anymore, not even enough to say good night before I disappear. Had I been meaning to tell a story, I would be showing my audience why, but I am not, so I won’t. I forget, most of the time, that people are people, and not stories. I forget, I think, that I am not a story either, but I can’t get rid of the narrator.

Until in a rush of dread and panic I remember: and then there is no story anymore, and that I do not know how to respond to. I retreat to my bookshelves, and do not bestow any good night wishes upon you. I tell the stories of what is and what was: of the things that never were, and others that likely never will be, and a hundred thousand scenes in which I did not play the part of the clown, and I fall asleep.

We’re in the rooms where women come and go and the radio announces, crackled voice of authority, that we’re in a montage scene, a fade-out, a blur. I had forgotten how, many years ago, I sang this song to someone, in a dark room, in a telephone that wasn’t mine. How this song, and that gesture, was one step on the way to finding another: and we were young, and we believed in forevers, and we believed that we would go against the world, together. We did. So many years of talking shit about one another’s love lifes and finding union in anger and misery. Fade-out. Cut.

In the rooms where people wait and wait. Music, music is never the plot, we know this. But it sneaks up on you from previous paragraphs; a cheap storytelling technique, nearly a plot device. Sneaks up on you:

In the rooms where people avoid one another’s glances, the music which tells a story of your past unfolds itself, and you don’t get a warning, and you think if this was visual media you would be unaffected and the effects would merely be there for your audience’s sake, but you are your audience, and you are watching yourself, in the light of the songs that were with you when you learned how to dream.

You wish, even if briefly, that you were less familiar with the storyteller’s tricks and intentions.