Sinister: The rings of Saturn and other celestial thingies

Mon Mar 11 11:58:51 GMT 2002

Hello, all you Sinister and yet somehow dextrous
people--

I'm not about to leave for work, so I won't have to
make this short.

My friend Peri is not on this list but should be. I'll
put her in the nursery soon, but pending that, I can
tell lies about her. Peri lives in a basement flat
here in Nova Gorica, and she has a garden she uses for
lying in when the sun shines. Sunday the sun is
beaming out of a deep blue sky and spring is on its
sprockets. Slavic proto-crocuses are popping out of
the ground everywhere with such speed that you really
cant go around unshod, and from my flat on the fourth
floor I can see all my neighbors daffodils
daffodiling madly out of their window boxes. My window
boxes contain nothing more lush than empty Lako cans,
but I am planning to sow them with great green fields
of cilantro.

About the time that I am doing my regular Sunday
errand, going to the hipermercato to verify that there
is not now nor will there ever be again any coconut
milk, Peri is reading a text message on her phone and
gnashing her teeth and kicking her curvy brown
naugahyde sofa and dashing her phone into billions of
shiny Finnish shards. The text message reads: I LOVE
YOU and it comes from someone who patently DOES NOT.

In the middle of a hot flat part of Argentina this
Monday morning there is a beautiful red-haired girl,
woman, really, who is seven hours behind me and so
its only still early there as I write this but she is
going to wake up soon and move from the big bed to the
desk at the foot of it and check her email. And she is
going to read something that will make her cry almost
certainly and pound on the keyboard in grief and
relief and maybe rend her raiment if any and rub ashes
into her lovely red hair (which is dyed, actually).
And thinking about that message, lurking there in her
inbox waiting to pounce, makes me feel slightly ill,
as though I had mailed her some anthrax (the spores,
not the band). But also slightly better.

I liked Sinister Digest #777 very much, very much
indeed. Thanks to everyone who contributed to making
#777 so very nice. Fernandos post made me think about
some things, like stars and how bright they are when
you live in a dark place, like that flat part of
Argentina was. There was plenty to make my existence
there less than ideal, like the insect population for
one, and letting the red-haired girl talk me out of
going to Sao Paulo and Rio in October, but the stars
were always amazing and made me pretty happy, although
sometimes I worried that I would get a starburn from
them because they were so brilliant and huge over my
head. I wish I could I could buy Fernando a powerful
telescope so that he could write a post describing the
rings of Saturn for us all. And just yesterday, as I
was watching the daffodils do what they do in all my
neighbors windowboxes, the most beautiful girl came
out onto her terrace into the sun, off there to the
left, a bit far away, really, across the green space,
and I noticed that she didnt have any curtains in the
windows, not even decadent yet rather boring
floor-length brown velvet curtains, or any Gustav
Klimt prints on the walls or anything else; her flat
looked like a tautologous hollow cavity and I was
wondering if she had just moved into the place, and I
wished that I could find a way to offer to help her
unpack and put up her curtains, which I have never
actually done but I am sure I would be really good at.
It occurred to me that all of us should have our
telephone numbers painted in huge numbers on the
outsides of our flats, so that if you saw someone
interesting you could phone them, rather than having
to resort to smoke signals (hazardous) or stalking
(time-consuming). The blocks of flats across the way
from me are full of people with lives and plants and
ice-blue television screens and drying laundry. It is
like watching a gigantic ant farm, and I am an ant on
the opposite side, but no one ever watches me the way
I was watching this cute girl in her black tank-top
that in the springtime revealed her navel, whose
existence I was sure of, but couldnt actually observe
at such a distance, like the rings of Saturn. Fernando
should lend me his binoculars.

On the thread of getting parcels in the post, I agree
completely with what Liz Daplyn et alia say about this
thrill. But if you are trying to double your summer
vacation by staying up all night, and if by chance you
are, oh, I dont know, OUT OF YOUR BOX when you order
things, the thrill is increased one-billion-fold,
because then you arent even expecting a package and
so when it arrives it feels as if you have some rich
and eccentric auntie you never knew about but who
knows all about you and is sending you perfect gifts.
This is how I came to own a Belle & Sebastian tea
towel. I think. I am not advocating substance abuse
(as I usually do), but merely pointing out that
sometimes dulling the old critical faculties as LD
put it can have its unforeseen benefits. Then again,
it can make one lose ones brand-new black v-neck in a
bar one shouldnt really have been in in the first
place. If only I had purchased that v-neck via
mail-order, I could be Savoring The Rich Irony right
now.

Since I have neglected to pay the bill, the council
have shut off the poetry in my flat. There was a
problem with my pay processing for a time there, which
was really stressing me out, along with the
deportation threat and everything else, mostly related
to girls or lack of them. Now that the sun is here and
other things are resolving themselves I am better, and
not nearly so misanthropic as my last, Zamfir-damning,
post would lead one to believe. And my bank account
shows a recent deposit so I can now pay my bills,
which is a good thing since I was afraid they were
going to shut off the gravity next, and I wouldn't
want to wake up on the ceiling again. But I dont know
who to speak to about getting the poetry reinstated.

I want to thank Christina McDermott for teaching me
the Russian for strip to the waist. I was wondering
how to say that and now I know, useful, too, since
Peri insists we go to Russia for our August
holidays--we get the whole month free. She lived in
Novosibersk for a time and wants to go back, claiming
it is a top-notch spot to do some debauching.
Knowing how to say padova ya padovnayen certainly
cant hurt. Peri is always going on about debauching,
and as I told her in Prague, where we didnt look up
the fictional Pauline L. Shivers, as I told her, Peri,
I said, you are all talk and then action. And then
talk again. Its true. Watch her in Edinburgh to see.

JDS

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