There Is No Me. There’s Just Things Happening.
‘Oh build your ship of death, your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine
for the dark flight down oblivion.’
Last night it was Lucia di Lammermoor projected on the wall from the Met, highbrow garnish for a 7-hour pulled pork with a mezcal negronis. Win and Dust lurk somewhere, beavering at their endeavours, this free opera thing having worn a brief arc across the firmament of novelty into the garbage can of noise. Still, it warbles up the stairs and under doors, seeking them out like sweet smoke from a slowly-braised parrot. Day 3 of running is no better than day 2. A complete absence of grace or poise, legs of lumber stab at the road, hammers banging through cake. I look down at the curling stones of my feet and cannot discern if they are moving forward, paddling in place or maybe going backward. The natural world gazes on; birds flit breezily through the filigree of spring foliage while gravity gathers the full winter weight of its smelly Oxfam comforter and dumps it on my back, as I Quasimodo west at one mile a week under the heft of God’s thumb. I weigh many thousands of pounds and am afraid I may crack the earth’s mantle. As I pass the garage I eye up the bike, mired in the dust of a decade’s good intentions. It has to come out. I don’t care if it’s cold, I’ll wrap myself in a duvet bound with duct tape. Back indoors lungs are shoehorned back into chest cavity whilst penning a limerick for the evening, for Mad Lucy, screeching unbridled up the Glen in her bloody nightie.
Gaetano, the great Donizetti
Had testicles bulbous and sweaty,
Which (though very smelly),
Made a ripe locatelli,
Which he grated upon his spaghetti.
Ah tits. We wake to white flakes tumbling from the sky. This is fallout, right? Holocaust insult to pandemic injury. Some loose-limbed infectee at Indian Point sneezed and elbowed the wrong lever? Well, that puts paid to any exercise. Guess I’ll cook pig again. He seems to have had a lot of shoulders, this swinish fellow: an Octopig: a Pigipede. So far he’s shrugged off a pork pie the size of a wagon wheel, three quarts of pulled pork and now carnitas. “Aw shucks,” he snorts, palms of his hooves raised in porcine modesty. His upper extremity loss is my lower torso gain, as a pendulous apron of risotto seethes over the waistband of these unchanging, everlasting underpants like malevolent blancmange, heading south, absorbing everything in its path. If I grab it with both hands and slap it against the front of my thighs it makes a sound not unlike sonic boom, causing avalanches. Tosca is brewing. There’ll be brains on the cobbles tonight.
In the pit of la Scala, Puccini
Conducted Boheme with zucchini,
“Believe it or not
I did Turandot
With bananas, two leeks and my weenie.”
Without warning, and like a fist in the ear from Ragnar the Boneless, the Met launches into Wagner Week. We just plumped the cushions and are cradling mugs of lapsang souchong ready for some giddy trilling about love potions that make every girl in the village blush like a chrysanthemum, when a longboat full of dudes in horned hats comes barreling through the living room chasing a dwarf across the bare buttocks of drooling giants who are busily raping some dirigible-titted lady with a ceramic amphora of golden apples. Fasolt is slaughtered by Fafnir who’s disemboweled by Siegfried who’s eviscerated by Hagen. Cue ululating Valkyries. Brünnhilde screams till her eyeballs burst, then hurls herself onto the hissing inferno of Siegfried’s burning cadaver: Valhalla is laid waste and everybody dies. Blimey. Who thought that was a good idea? Did somebody at the Met forget we’re looking down the malignant gizzard of a plague? I’m like the Countess Dowager over here, flailing on the sofa in a fit of the vapors. We flick channels to some Olivier Assayas flick and all of a sudden Kristen Stewart’s taking her togs off, unsolicited, bless her heart. She’s going to catch a cold. It’s all eyes on stalks at Cottager’s Bottom, the children are given candy and sent to their rooms, and grandpa’s barking like a seal, his teeth chomping freelance across the coffee table. If this is the New Now – free opera and beautiful boys with boobs – then maybe the Old Then can bugger off forever.
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