Afternoon of unobtrusive rain / unobtrusive afternoon of rain / root ginger and closed cup mushrooms and red onions outside the grocery / the rain falling andante on the canopy / cars parked up at the White Spot in the rain / rain unvarying / afternoon intersecting with evening.
1.WHAT TIME DO YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING?
Who gives a fuck?
2.IF YOU COULD EAT LUNCH WITH ONE FAMOUS PERSON, WHO WOULD IT BE?
Who gives a fuck?
3.GOLD OR SILVER?
Who gives a fuck?
4.WHAT WAS THE LAST FILM YOU SAW AT THE CINEMA?
Who gives a fuck?
5.FAVORITE TV SHOW?
Who gives a fuck?
6.WHAT DO YOU HAVE FOR BREAKFAST?
Who gives a fuck?
7.WHO WOULD YOU HATE TO BE LEFT IN A ROOM WITH?
Who gives a fuck?
8.CAN YOU TOUCH YOUR NOSE WITH YOUR TONGUE?
Who gives a FUCK?
9.WHAT INSPIRES YOU?
Who gives a fuck?
10.WHAT’S YOUR MIDDLE NAME?
Who gives a fuck?
11.BEACH, CITY, or COUNTRY?
Who gives a fuck?
12.SUMMER OR WINTER?
Who gives a fuck?
13.FAVORITE ICE CREAM?
Who gives a fucking FUCK?
14.BUTTERED, PLAIN, OR SALTED POPCORN?
Who gives a fuck?
15.FAVORITE COLOR?
Who gives a fuck?
16.FAVORITE VEHICLE?
Who gives a fuck?
17.FAVORITE SANDWICH FILLING?
Who gives a fuck?
18.WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SONG AT THIS MOMENT?
Who gives a fuck? - The Fuckers.
19.WHAT CHARACTERISTICS DO YOU DESPISE?
Who gives a fuck?
20.FAVORITE FLOWER?
Who gives a fuck?
21.IF YOU HAD A BIG WIN IN THE LOTTERY, HOW LONG WOULD YOU WAIT TO TELL PEOPLE?
Who gives a fuck?
22.FIZZY OR STILL WATER AS A DRINK?
Who gives a fuck?
23.WHAT IS YOUR MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT DURING HIGH(SECONDARY) SCHOOL?
Who gives a fuck?
24.HOW MANY KEYS ON YOUR KEY RING?
Who gives a fuck?
25.WHERE WOULD YOU RETIRE TO?
Who gives a fucksville?
26.CAN YOU JUGGLE? IF YES HOW MANY?
Who gives a fuck?
27.FAVORITE DAY OF THE WEEK
Who gives a fuck?
28.RED OR WHITE WINE?
Who gives a fuck?
29.WHAT DID YOU DO FOR YOUR LAST BIRTHDAY?
Who gives a fuck?
30.IF YOU COULD ASK FOR JUST ONE THING (CAN’T BE MONEY OR MORE WISHES) WHAT WOULD IT BE?
Fuck off.
On a Monday afternoon in spring,
the tart odour of asphalt
from a new-laid road, and, new-mown,
the tang of verge-cuttings,
hang in the air as I linger
(getting off work early again)
in this light industrial zone
by the brimful Fraser,
and I ride the bus home
and see the people I might have been:
children slouching home from school,
an elderly lady trying
to bring in a red wheelie-bin,
or that man forking his lawn
thru a down of cherry blossom,
on a Monday afternoon in spring.
is like flaring our nostrils: some of us can do it, and some of us can’t, and the former ought to accept it, and not do it excessively, but only when the moment is opportune, and generally not act as though it’s some kind of beatitude, and the latter ought to quit bitching about it, and quit trying but failing to do it when everyone’s watching them, because they just look stupe’d.
I’m driving on a narrow road, through the countryside where I grew up. It’s a pungent summer afternoon, the air ripe with hayseed and manure, the verges thick with cow parsely and overhung with elderflower. The land is crisscrossed with ditches and disused canals, which the road traverses by means of hump-backed bridges, the kind that belong in fairytales. Approaching one such bridge, I put my hand on the worn plastic gearstick and drop into second, aware that part of my life has elapsed, that I can’t come back here again, again to feel this way, under such a blue benign incautious sky.
See? It’s not so bad after all. Still the old balm, the calmative. The repetitive sorting, cataloguing, sifting. The soft abrasion of syllables on the tongue. Ordering that unruly universe, like it used to be. The best method yet devised, and the first. Unfurl words. Put the little old automobile in reverse. Edging, the clutch scudding, nervously, park up, get out find a path and cartwheel hair over heels away.
It feels like five o’clock in the morning, but I know it isn’t yet, because (i) the milkman hasn’t yet come, and (ii) when it feels like five it’s never after half three. I get up off the ground, slowly, and listen to the night - the trunk road, a kilometer distant, sussurant, the slow rise and fall of the residents’ breasts in their beds, the endless spiel of the stars.
I’m cold and I try to clear my head and hug back shivers. Not that I’ve any complaints, mind - I’ll weave in and out of the small hours and then take myself home at twenty past seven, on the first bus, and get some proper kip. For now, let’s just wait and see what happens, here. No danger - this is suburbia, the city that never wakes.
Lover’s bridge. A hump-backed throwback to when all this really was fields. The ditch is a quag these days and graffiti marbles the stone and rendering, Y2K + 4 EVAs interceding between monosyllabic names.
Shh. I back into the hedge. Edge of the city, the civic gut overhanging the green belt, an hour later, say four thirty a.m. C’mere. Ct ct ct ct. Whisper, c’mere, ch ch ch ch. Golden green eyes, impasse, either side of the narrow ex-country road. Pss pss. Ah, fuck you, then, eh. Sit there and fuckin’ stare, I can wait. I don’t have to be anywhere. Five minutes, ten minutes, fift- oh aye? Hey, there’s a girl. Pssh. Just the two of us out tonight. I reach out, she inches on, a black smear in the first incursion of dawn. Holy shit, what’s that? She’s over my head and into the hedge, as a velveteen whine and a blur of light near, and round the corner, and face me, and it’s the fucking milk float, the bastard, and morning’s here.
Well, now I’m out of breath. I’m going to sit on my sofa and regain my composure, and when I’m not so flustered, I’ll get back to that summer’s day in 198X. But it’s funny how one thing leads to another, when you’re reminiscing. The memories are like pieces of scree on a mountainside - one false footstep and one or two will fall, and they’ll set off one or two more, and before you know it you’re at the bottom of the hill, buried under thousands of the things, wishing you’d not left the safety of that gully, or that ridge, or wherever it was you were that was so secure. But in reality, and I may be stretching a point here but I’m sure points have been stretched much further before, in reality, you’d have been washed out of that gully by a cloudburst, or blown off that ridge by a sudden gale. So you tiptoe through the memories and accept the consequences if you fall.
Memories of excusing myself from a school exam at this point in the road, turning instead to the towpath, caked in the sun.
Propping the bike up against the bridge, stretching out the legs.
Practically possible in every pastoral way.
Buzz of a distant tractor on the air. Last week of May or thereabouts, things pupating, things hatching, indecencies. Take off top, take off shoes, socks, roll up trouser legs, sunbathe. Skinshed. Brown imprint on brown canalbank, brown stamp of man on land, invisible, inbetween, tanned. Constructed from pure nostalgia, liable to melt into a pool of common bile under fair any memory at all.