Saturday, May 31, 2014

Nobody Blogs on a Saturday morning

It’s a miscalculation to work at a college as you age.

Co-worker: I thought you were twenty-five?
M: You must not have seen me in direct light.

The beginnings of the essay are rooted in aphorisms about the Spartans. Now we have bumper stickers.

In the evening, all the girls in the building are wearing skirts and the boys smell like cologne. When they get off the elevator it smells like a bar: cigarette smoke and cheap booze. I get on with four loads of laundry.

The secret to getting laundry done in a building with college students is to do it on Friday nights.

At parties people tend to laugh more. The music pounds into the walls and reverberates on the ceiling where we lie on the couch passing the time until our eyes shut. A part of me yearns to be upstairs, to be amongst the spilled drinks and haphazard conversations.

Meaning has a lot more to do with our definition than we'd like to admit. Perhaps God miscalculated when he gave us free will.

The cars that pass on the street below make noise like a whirring fan as the rain spins from their tires. The occasional honk rises above the din of voices from the street level below. The kids and those damn parties. Weren't most of us kids once?

In the building across the street all the lights are turned off. It looks abandoned at night, like some ghost ship moored inland. During the day, some workmen climb around on the exterior constantly working on the large balconies that no one ever walks on.

On Saturdays, no one reads blogs. I said something clever earlier tonight that sounded like an aphorism, but it has already slipped my mind.

Most of life is forgotten. If you're lucky, you remember the good things.

Planes coast through the dark blank sky landing at an airport thirty minutes away carrying strangers into this city where we sleep so early.

Outside a few mindless cicadas make noise, uncertain that their season has passed. How do you know when your season has passed? When the music is no longer intended for you?

I don't read on Saturdays either.

I had an incident with wine I'd like to forget. The wine helped.

After midnight the noise begins to ebb. But in the city it is never entirely silenced. A few miles away strangers wipe the drool from their cheeks and awake in a new city. This miracle of flight, imagined by Da Vinci, failed at by Icarus through pride, is just one more way of getting around.

Tomorrow we'll compare paint samples in a store, discuss the difference between hues of blue and green. We won't ask ourselves about the night before. We'll move ahead with our day, and forget about the sirens and the rain and the voices that drift down for the apartment above. Tonight, they were not meant for us. 

1 comment:

  1. i do read blogs on saturdays..this was quite good!

    ReplyDelete