17 July 2001
You get into Glasgow Central Station and set your watch back five minutes. Travelling can get confusing when you don't leave timezones. Force of habit plagues you like a blight.
Pixie tells me my favorite author is in town tonight, do I want to go? Sure, I say, flicking my tongue over a rough patch of flesh in my mouth.
There's a gathering in the basement of a bookstore. A big bookstore, Corporate America snaking its tendrils out like a greedy squid. Clawing through towns and cities it has no reason to be in. But it is.
I don't ask which bookstore, they all sell the same books. Pixie tells me this is called free market. You're free to buy whatever you want from wherever you want, it all goes back to the same place eventually.
I've seen this guy before, eight months ago, in the same basement of the same store. He was funny then, I hope he'll be funny this time. He is. He's very funny. He tells us about confessions from out of the blue, confessions of waiters and bellboys and all the little people. He makes me scared to go and eat anywhere ever again.
Looking down into my eyes he tells me that the only way to persuade an attack dog to let go of your arm is to stick your finger up its butt. I smile because I know it works with turtles as well. Pixie looks at me and smiles. I wonder when the next time I'll be attacked by a turtle will be.
My tongue finds the rough patch in my mouth again and I ponder over what I'll write about this night? This Monday night in the middle of a summer I'd been enjoying until the weather changed for the worse. Pixie tells me that since Derek Powazek wrote about seeing this guy everyone and their dog has too. I wonder if he went before I did eight months ago?
The Cult of Personality, Pixie describes it to me, extends into a meme. Just like the french word that means "same", somebody does something original and we all emulate it. Emulating a writing style is easy, you just change a few words around and smile when people ask if you were inspired by someone else. I know this because Pixie knows this.
Read your work out loud, says the author. But I suspect he doesn't mean right away. Read it aloud and you'll discover you shy away from s's and v's, and favor t's and d sounds instead. I can't believe Jack Lemmon is dead.
Read it aloud and you'll never have to worry about it not sounding right to your public because you'll know what doesn't sound right to yourself and fix it first. He has signed my copy of his first book, the dedication says "Deliver yourself from selfish friends" because I told him nobody ever gives it back when I lend it to them. This is my fifth copy.
Triskadekaphobia is the fear of the number thirteen. An irrational fear I feel needs pointing out because how can you be afraid of a number? No, no, I'm told, you've got it wrong. You've got it wrong, its fear of Friday the thirteenth. Does that make any more sense? This has nothing at all to do with the story I was telling. Does it further the plot any or does it just serve as a stand alone paragraph? Pixie doesn't say anything.
The reading and questions end and the author agrees to sign anyone who arrived late, saying he'll stay as long as it takes. I like him because he's a good person and never boring. I realise we have the same shaggy hair and stubble and I ask Pixie later if I'm the Diet version of him. She just rubs my head.
The day before we had been trying to tidy up some stuff that had gotten out of hand in her room. The room is too small for her, she needs to become a hermit crab and change shell. She knows this and she says she knows this. I know this, she says. She lifts something up and the small black Zen garden tumbles, falling face down on a seat. The pebbles are thrown across the carpet and the sand trickles off the side of the chair like a broken hourglass. The moment is frozen in time until Pixie breaks the silence...
"Bugger, that's not very Zen, is it."
Chuck being silly.
Woah ! bad ugly dude
What happened to his shoulders?
:)
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