Deciduous
Is this what a Horatian and a Juvenalian satire mixed up by the 21st century zeitgeist will look like?
I know now what I like - classic cuts with avant garde prints. Cuban collars. Family histories for light conversation topics. That's all. And so much that I hate. Starting with language - “sad songs” what does that even mean? It means something different to everyone, and all of those meanings are at least 90% stupid. Comma after dear sir AND after hi Bev. Hi, Bev. Otherwise it's all been for nothing. Foam in drinks is bullshit.
But on rare midweek mornings when life has rented a room in the eternal hibernation underground hideout-cum escape prison, It stumbles upon some good people. Sohla talks spices blooming in oil Seasoning soup to learn seasoning Water, she says, it's just water. Water is difficult. And your potatoes need to go in way before you season, she says And then you season again and you season soon - your potatoes They're starchy, she says, are going to soak up all the salt and pepper. Sohla is smart. Sohla tempers spices. Spices don't like water. And she talks about umami from greens. She also makes funny videos.
She reminds me of Rajiv with the Potter guy, Guy. There is nuance in the shape, he says. Let's just have some fun doing pottery made him sick. Guy has a secret Miss Piggy voice - what a beautiful expensive bowl, he says and he has a motorcycle and uses words like let the clay respond to you, 400 gallons of propane, oxidisation. Sohla and Guy are so right. Rajiv makes 18th century calligraphy that does not show on videos made to satisfy the devil knows what and why. Just mostly always why - why satisfy for what? Rajiv also binds books, collects string from port-cities, understands something about florist’s wire. Then there's Morocco who blindfolded talks about something not being quite right about the pancetta. Reverse engineering, eloquent, studious, funny with a low tolerance for short-cuts. All of them are funny. Funny in a way nobody I know understands which is why my friends who had no antennae for subtle humour hated me in high-school English classes. My teacher was one of us, probably sad, but she kept her thing and it kept her brilliant. She would have loved Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley - an oral fixation hasn't built better sarcasm 24 hilarious Violet Crawley lines is a serious work - "What is a weekend?" Violet asks.
One night they make me realise why I don't like so many things about all that is around me. On an average day - and yes on an average there are 365 average days, and that is the absurd hyperbole which we call 21st century reality - and THAT, friends, is the irony of ironies, which 97% of my readers are not going to understand and will call me a bad writer - and so on an average day one only climbs, and mends, climbs and mends. The 97% are also going to hate long sentences and on this particular poem they are just going to have to read. Google and read. I once lost a face-painting competition because the judges did not understand Yin and Yang. Someone whispered to me dumb it down with a kind smile. I felt like the kind woman who looked like my mother means to say that there is a WAY to change the final art. I was surprised people think a brush stroke can be taken back. People are funny.
On an average day fortunes come in the form of fluffy pillows some rich jackass told you is supposed to be comfortable. Your parents want you to be the Them in society. Not the harmless us. You want to be your parents. At least. You think in terms of at least now. And there is nobody -
Women trained so much for talent, they have zero taste. Or time. And hence zero sense of nuance. They know everything and yet they know so little. Men so insufferable. So diminished by the paltry. Things so new, so few, vulgar in their lack of grain. I don't like Wordsworth, not anymore, but I hate everything so much that I think he was right when he said that "the Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner." A woman would have said it with a better personality but yes, it is an ugly, mechanical, desperate, lonely world for people who want to become themselves.
There is nobody - There is negative space, it is not beautiful. The depth of field shows night turning, a shadow running. There is no room left.
There is no time - my children want to understand everything - how did children receive so wrong, their childhood? Who gave this to them? It is not curiosity anymore, but a monster perhaps by the name of arrogance ignorant of itself. A monster masquerading. So much is funny and so wrong.
Everybody is sure. Everybody is happy. Everybody is sad. Everybody wants. Everybody will do whatever it takes. Everything recedes into the air, the seas, in the forests and into oblivion, protecting itself from men and women. Some of us are homeless and those that we have, even they are lost, adrift.