1:07am: A Break In The Weather
You are walking alone through wind-driven rain, except that it is not raining and you are not alone. It is bright and warm, the sun's rays coaxing water from the pores at the base of your neck, you fumble with the top button of your collar though your gloves are a hindrance in working it free. But you needed the gloves, what choice had you, really, against the pouring rain, the battering wind? And alone, are you serious? You are pulled and jostled and joltled and pushed with every step along the crowded sidewalk, for you are not in Winnepeg, after all, but New York City, and not just the city but the very heart of it, the vital nerve center near the root of the molar, where morning neurons pour from the underground like a river of blood from a three-inch gash, staining the upholstery and buying up all the croutons.
Well, but you have not been to the vital nerve center at the heart of the city in more time than you could measure on the calender of the vernal equinox they they handed you when you passed through the gates at 79th and Fifth, your head lowered as though in an act of contrition, as if you did not speak English and add prices in your head in the line at the check-out counter.
It little matters: there were more 60-degree days this winter than the whole of last summer. The ozone layer is gone, or never existed, and the world is going to implode one day in a spiraling gooseball of language and regret when the scaffolding gives out and we fall like a boulder from the back of unyielding Sisyphus, repulsed, in the final analysis, by the no-trade clause and a pitiful signing bonus.
Posted by cronish at March 22, 2002 01:28 AM