All of us were here for a little while and then we were somewhere else
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I started watching the Game Show Network right around when the pandemic and middle age and suburbia all hit me concurrently none of which I have yet to and will likely never rebound from and something I still can’t get over two years later watching anew every evening eating our little coffee table dinner is how on most of the games every contestant is this kind of pure grotesquerie from California which is the most uncanny state in America the most uncanny country in creation. I haven’t gotten through the Rehearsal yet but I’m reminded of how when I used to watch Nathan For You and I’d think it’s a trick it’s all actors but no it’s just that people there are like that. Californians are a people who simply want to be able to drive two miles in under 90 minutes if they can time traffic right and who love to be insane. No one will ever figure them out. Not Steinbeck or Hammett or Chandler or Didion or West or Tarantino.
It’s all just pool balls clattering.
I don’t know what that is supposed to mean but it sounded like something.
Ahhh shit a millipede or something like that an associate of the overarching millipede enterprise just skittered past me and I made a noise that I’m not exactly proud of. It was a pretty big one too. It’s pouring rain in Massachusetts today and cold already this early in September and I’ve seen some of these types of guys in the basement before so this had better not be the harbinger of an exodus of some kind. I flailed for something to kill it with out of instinct and it was quicker than I was and ran for cover and now it’s gone to the limbo where the things you can’t see anymore wait. Where your mother goes when she hides behind her hands.
The spiders have been finding their way inside too now that it’s getting colder. I just saw a remarkable one outside this morning while taking out the trash. It had erected one of the most elaborate webs I’ve ever seen. Adjusting for scale it was like a spider mansion like when you read a story about a guy’s house probably in California that has thirteen bathrooms and an indoor basketball court and all the rest of that and it looks like fucking shit. Not this web though this web had craftsmanship behind it holding up better than even the spider itself probably would have expected in the downpour. You could imagine the other older spiders the “we used to build things around here” spiders coming over to admire it and they’d all be standing around going now that’s a proper web until whoever the biggest one was decided to eat everybody.
I was trying so hard earlier to think of the other California writer I wanted to mention above in my little list there and all I could remember was that I had posted a picture of the book that I can’t remember on Instagram ten years ago which isn’t an especially efficient mechanism for remembering books. I scrolled down and down and down into my past last night aging myself in reverse and there it was in 2012 sitting on the side table of a hotel: Ask the Dust by John Fante. Let me look up a couple of quotes from it real quick to jog my memory.
"All of us were here for a little while, and then we were somewhere else; we were not alive at all; we approached living, but we never achieved it. We are going to die. Everybody was going to die."