Wednesday, 01/28/04 - 7:59 pm.
I'm taking a break from babysitting my nephew. He's watching a movie right now. I love the guy, and I'm going to miss him when he starts school next week, but dear God, I have no time for myself all through the day!!! But who am I kidding? I seriously have nothing better to do than look after a 7 year old (pathetic much?).
I finished Flush last night. It took me two hours. I was going to read for 20 minutes, but there's a point in which it gets intense and I couldn't stop. The ending almost made me cry. Eventually, I realized that the book was truly a thrilling mindfuck for me. All the words fitted perfectly one next to the other and made my head spin and feel to the core everything she was talking about. Virginia Woolf is really a wonderful writer (and, coincidence perhaps, I found out yesterday it was her birthday). I'm going to the bookstore to get another of her books.
Calvin & Hobbes' cartoon strip of today (in the local newspaper, anyway) hit me deeply. It's this one. Hobbes sums up my feelings on the subject so well. You know that feeling, when your favorite band puts into words a feeling you couldn't shape up? (*this is where you say yes*) Well, it was kind of like that.
Sometimes I think I don't have enough pets. I love animals. Like, hardcore. I have Frog (I can't get enough of her), I have Freud (he's the only fish I've ever known that acknowledges my existence, and I could watch him for hours) and I have...a parrot who remains nameless. Well, we call him Parrot. That's his christian name, actually (he's funny, but he eats human flesh). I like cats, but I'd rather be one than have one. Rodents and reptiles, I love them, of course (remember my lizard, Prozac? well, yeah, he was dead, but that's not the point), but they don't qualify as pets to me. And I don't want birds, they look better when they're free. And I sweat hatred for cages from every pore of my body. I think I need a horse, but the house's too small.
This thing about cages. Parrot had always lived in one. One day I snapped into reality and I discovered how sickening and pathetic it must be to be surrounded by metal bars when you have wings. It's sadder when people cut them off. Years and years later, I opened his cage. Within months I noticed he was less agressive. Always the goddamn beast that wants to tear your flesh apart, but less agressive nonetheless. Ok, so sometimes he still flies away and my mom runs around the block for hours, knocking on the neighbors' doors, trying to get him back, but most of the times he climbs up to the tree next to his cage and stays there, just standing about, the fucker.
But all that's a tangent. Back to the book. There was a quote about being nothing (yeah, like me). Something along the lines that being nothing was the most satisfactory thing on earth. I thought that was an odd quote. An even odder idea. Here I sat yesterday, talking about how I felt nothing, and at night someone who died over 60 years ago tells me that that's satisfactory. I can't deny it completely, because, like I said, feeling nothing is better than feeling empty or sad (stretching it a bit, it could also relate to the Fight Club line of being free to do anything). And perhaps feeling nothing is funnier than feeling happy. Now that I think about it...it is, you know?
But, just for the record, that doesn't make me feel any less desperate, dry nor gagged.
Simeon said: here's an idea: write about writer's block. It's a good idea, but it's accomplishment-proof. I can't write because I have writer's block, I am not a writer. If you're not a writer, like yours truly, then your block is just out of talentlessness. I can't write because I have nothing but an urge. I have no side dish to go with the urge: nothing clever, well structured to say. Nothing to say, simple as that.
Go figure, all this talking has sort of inspired me. I feel like writing and illustrating a book called "the satisfactions of an amoeba". I can draw amoebas, you know? That'll do.
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