radiant fracture

So I might be going to read at Pride in the Word. It's next Saturday night, 7pm, Open Space Gallery. I expect it costs money.

The reason it is definite and I am tentative is best explained through psychological narrative.

I'd found the roster for Pride in the Word, and thought, "I never get invited to read at these things." I felt sorry for myself for a bit, and then I allowed the eventual corollary, "Because no one has the faintest idea who I am."

So I asked the Captain of all our hearts, "Captain, what should I do to become the sort of person who gets asked to be in poetry readings?"

Whereupon he offered me part of his stage time. I was so alarmed that I tried to refuse. He wasn't having any, and inlandsea said that being afraid that no one would like me was not a good reason not to do it.

Stupid believing in yourself. Too much work.

Annnyway. Any number of forces might prevent it from happening. Logistics. A rain of herring. If they somehow don't, I'll be there. And if you go, well, you'll be there, too. There are lots of other people reading that you might like better.

Saturday. 7 o'clock. Open Space.

There. I've done what I can.

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I 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.

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