Lunch, Sex, Little Thoughts

Operation Bringing Homemade Lunch was successful. I made an expansive tomato-pepper-scallion omelette last night and lavished half of it onto a bed of rice in a small tub. After translating some small passages of Han Feizi and Zhuangzi, I went down for lunch. The department kitchen was roasting with the ghosts of various aromas set adrift from the microwave turnstile. The dish still revolving on the little pageant platform in the center of the oven had the most enchanting, meaty fragrance. Imagine the truest consomme of the heartiest cuts of real animal burst into juicy vapour, perfectly salted and rounded out by the subtle reduction of savory garlic and the plainness of a new potato--that was what reigned. My humble box of nearly vegetarian repast awaited its turn. The owner of the dish in the oven came to claim it. We exchanged polite smiles--I'm still not sure who these willowy women are who seem to emerge from nowhere at lunchtime--maybe from some airy office up on high? Under the staircase? From some male (straight) scholar's noontime dozings? ... I compliment her on the aroma of her cooking (colour, aroma, and taste are the three traditional criteria) and she modestly shrugs it off. I look closer at the contents of her blue and white tupperware. A few greyish logs of meat sat unhappily next to slices of pale, half-mushed potato over a few squashed hillocks of rice. Isn't it curious how sometimes the smell of food can be more intoxicating or flavourful than the food itself?

* * *
The opera lady from Saturday is still with me. I've been singing all day and the Mission-style arches are terribly forgiving. "A foggy day, in London town...", medieval French pavane (reawakened since "Orlando" the film. I think I've a crush on Tilda Swinton), et al. LPC, I'm so grateful to you and your authentically hippie sentiments. World music and dance, lo-budget hideaways in the fjords, cross-cultural crushes, communal showers, home-made breads, Swedish chocolate balls, and putz pause--mwah!!

* * *
On our home library shelf, I found a book called "Men" when I was fifteen years ripe. I wasn't sure whose book it was as it didn't seem like the kind of read I could picture Far's purchasing at Donner's and asking the reedy blonde clerk to wrap up in a flat brown paper bag. Maybe it was the pool-side companion to a bygone lady-friend from the early eighties: our library had a habit of absorbing (usually pulpy) anomalies into its mainstay garrisons of classic orange Penguin editions of bona fide literature authenticated by their smooth, yellowed pages. To his credit, Far had read nearly all his orange Penguins and recalls a good number of them. He has become especially fond lately of reciting the Danish poetry of his youth. It is no small tragedy that no one in the family understands enough of the language to commiserate with him on the passing of localised, able art into oblivion.

"Men" was an unasked for treasury of aspects of men as encountered by the game, angelic protagonist whose blonde perfection entices many lessons in love and loss. From this surprisingly well-written and unsentimental, even elegant book, I learned what an orgon box was and heard the name "Tobias" for the first time. Its episodes were erotic and natural, sometimes harsh and stark as the characters who find themselves naked in a woody clearing. I shivered and felt awkward with them. It was the ideal teenage narrative. All that worldliness gained in a day's cloistering in my bed.

It is only now that I have begun to notice the counterparts to the book's myriad lost souls and preoccupied beings substantiated in real life. How amazing and strange that people can have intimacy in the world when there is so much ceremony: circling, panting, handkerchief dropping, build-up to the dance, the fire on the walls, and perchance, the mutual surrender to dicey joy until dawn, the end of the month, the revolution of the earth around the sun, the closing of the black velvet curtain. Where does that sustained momentum come from? I rejoice in being alive and not defeated by the awesome prospects of that work, but it is a Monday in November: I want to know--but don't want to know. If action is what is needed to cut through all the thwarting stuff, then why don't people push on through to the end? Everything should have a beginning and an end. I would drive my cart to the end of the earth if I decided to find out about the horizon.

Why begin with a serenade and decline into silence? A certain Japanese artist leapt through frames with sealed paper doors, breaking them down, rupturing through them like the life force he is and represents. I've forgotten his name, but not his unique action. Or should I be the one spurred into movement? But what if my eye is off and it's not the moon, but some lantern of the dead on the water? What if the Way of natural occurrences takes care of everything and I need just float along like a lantern of my own? After a while, these questions are useless like what someone said about the rain driving into the sea.

"Why?" in the broader context of "relationships"--this is probably the most boring mystery. Maybe "Sex and the City" was right. If they don't follow up on those early throwaway gestures of kind attention, it's because they weren't that into you in the first place. The next question is: "then why bother from the start?" [I'm getting bored by this whinging myself. Such little thoughts. I'd rather have larger ones that encompass the roundness of the world. Mwahahahaha.... I had considered reinstating J. on Friendster (a silly enterprise all together) after a healing conversation in the past week, but was saved by the epiphany that if I did, I would be setting myself up for petty attentions... When Scary Rice is about to take the podium after Powell bows out. I can understand his reasons for leaving the evil office, but with him and his presumably more enlightened sympathisers gone, the spaces will only be filled by numbers with less conscience and more teething ambition.]

Lordy save us... from little thoughts and big idiotic actions alike. In the meantime, strike up that old, slack-stringed guitar and chase its six silver maids into a frenzy as you hang up the old tangible line of a song! And dance, dance, dance, all night long.