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what is the sound of one man snapping?
Oct. 30th, 2005 02:18 pmI dropped my keys down the toilet the other day. I think it may have been Friday. My days have a curious dilated-compressed feeling. Work crunches up my hours like so many peanut M&Ms, yet yesterday stretches back into a vivid distance.
It was vivid, yes, to drop my keys down the toilet. I had a pile of books and things on the window ledge in the bathroom, and I picked it all up, and I heard a PLONK.
At first I couldn't believe it, because the bowl gleamed empty and impeccably clean, and because there'd been no splash, no spatter, no scrape of key-edge in sewer-pipe -- just that singular PLONK.
I looked all along the floor, under the tub, behind the toilet. Small objects sometimes catch on the baseboards in Paris, and balance suspended behind furniture, visible neither from above nor from below. I lost-and-found a book that way. But no.
I didn't try to grope for the keys at first. If they weren't there, reality was going to spring on me and shake me around in its mouth, and I wanted a moment of quiet before that happened. I sat back and imagined with numbed awe the possible inconveniences that might precipitate from this PLONK -- calls to the landlord (should I do all the dishes first?) -- delays -- awkward negotiations around coming and going (leave my door unlocked?)
Then I stuck my hand down the toilet and fished the keys out. They were sitting just out of sight. I washed the keys and my hands thoroughly, and then, because the keys have so many more nooks and crannies than my hands, and because I have no bleach or rubbing alcohol, I soaked the keys in a small measure of very good gin. Then I applied some gin to myself, internally, as a measure against bacteria.
This is not to say that my life is somehow symbolically involved with keys, toilets, or gin, whether or not love is like a bottle of any of these things. This is just to say: children, it's been a long week.
{rf}
It was vivid, yes, to drop my keys down the toilet. I had a pile of books and things on the window ledge in the bathroom, and I picked it all up, and I heard a PLONK.
At first I couldn't believe it, because the bowl gleamed empty and impeccably clean, and because there'd been no splash, no spatter, no scrape of key-edge in sewer-pipe -- just that singular PLONK.
I looked all along the floor, under the tub, behind the toilet. Small objects sometimes catch on the baseboards in Paris, and balance suspended behind furniture, visible neither from above nor from below. I lost-and-found a book that way. But no.
I didn't try to grope for the keys at first. If they weren't there, reality was going to spring on me and shake me around in its mouth, and I wanted a moment of quiet before that happened. I sat back and imagined with numbed awe the possible inconveniences that might precipitate from this PLONK -- calls to the landlord (should I do all the dishes first?) -- delays -- awkward negotiations around coming and going (leave my door unlocked?)
Then I stuck my hand down the toilet and fished the keys out. They were sitting just out of sight. I washed the keys and my hands thoroughly, and then, because the keys have so many more nooks and crannies than my hands, and because I have no bleach or rubbing alcohol, I soaked the keys in a small measure of very good gin. Then I applied some gin to myself, internally, as a measure against bacteria.
This is not to say that my life is somehow symbolically involved with keys, toilets, or gin, whether or not love is like a bottle of any of these things. This is just to say: children, it's been a long week.
{rf}
