I wanted to run all day. I sat in class all morning and didn't listen a bit. I wanted to run, and jump across Paris' European mansard roofs, and I wanted to kick in walls and yell at the sky. And I kept on thinking about that crepe I left alone yesterday. Not the man. My conscience isn't that extensive. Sry God, Sry Mom and Dad, Sry Rabbi Sirkman. The way mind works, he probably did something corky and out of the box with the crepe. Maybe he tie-dyed it and hung it behind the lava lamp in his living room. I hear tie-dye is coming back in. Or I predict it. I predicted it this summer actually. The next trend in minimalist fashion will be tie-dye, coincident with post-WW2 hollywood couture. I'm talking Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Sean William Scott. Maybe he put lipstick on it and is going to break out of the crepe making business and break into the crepe puppeteer business. I am an enabler. My residual, forgotten crepes don't bear into the past, they change the world.
He was a bad person anyways. The Metro at Odeon closes on November 2, so he's ausched, clipped out of my life with those Crayola zig-zag vanity scissors.
This morning I snoozed the alarm for a supplemental hour. That would be okay if I showered, and I didn't, which would be okay if I ate breakfast, but I don't think coffee and an accidental fly counts, which would be okay if I listened in class so that I could provide myself with act two, "Lunch," but that didn't really work out because the money crops aren't high in these parts, which would be okay if I were running and not blogging and preparing for a nap now, but there are a lot of things to dream about. And my dreams are great. I wish you all could see them-- that's called a while lie; it's when I say something that's untrue, but the ineffectuality of the lie makes it okay to say. An example is when I pretend to understand a sentence that my professor is saying about the tense passe- so I guess, by syllogism, it's okay if I do it for every sentence she says, which is good, because I did. For four hours.
Judy, a friend of Mom and Robert, called this week, and very graciously extended an invitation to Fontainebleau. I posted a picture of Fontainebleau. Did you see it? Oh, you did? I'm so embarrassed! I didn't even realize that anyone could see it. Maybe you should've knocked. Well, it will be a nice way to get time away from the city, which I'm by no means craving, but perspective always mutates out of departure from a place. I am actually cultivating love for Paris, but the same kind of love I would with a human. Paris is sad because it's the human condition. I have so much love for it, and it really doesn't care that much about me. When I begin to peripherally admire it, perfunctorily worship at it, insert smiles of understanding in the film's inkblot, it huddles over me. The Tour Montparnasse is so phallic. Every morning it rips into the sky, sick with rumbling morning, and winks at me with its strewn illuminated floors. The ATM tells me to enter my PIN discreetly, as the digitized computer icon winks at me. The woman at the bakery pretends to have my order programmed so that I don't have to regurgitate yesterdays fluttering French. The roofs spout smoke and I pretend that they are new thoughts. My admiration for and fear of culture has always humbled me enough to treat concepts like people. It's an old city. With so much history that you accept it like worn beauty, or the smell in the crease of an antiquated book. Yes, it is prominent, but besides that, it is what it is. Paris tells me to take it as it is. I need to learn to say the same thing for myself. All European cities are somehow gracefully deceased. The city walls, like the wormy skin of a gnarled apple are frightening and uninviting, but the core is rich. It soils the world around it. Paris has reigned majestic in waves, but for over 500 years. America is new, booming with dysphonic melodies of different phases, a slot machine stuck on thirty bell icons, the anti-gravity at the peak of a centripetal amusement park ride, the second serving of a wedding cake. Paris is a Sunday walk at the bank of the river. It is the feeling you have when taking off your shoes at the end of a long day. It is relief and appreciation. You take it as it is or smile at it obliviously, a passer-by. Paris, to me, is an unfriendly giant, with tugboats and flower carts rolling on its back. When I first got here, I felt like a newborn. I hadn't idealized it in the human, perhaps healthy way. I arrived, and to me it was only a new place. There is no place I could have gone but central Nebraska to feel complete awe. But now, having established a saving period for every tourist attraction, at some point in mid November, I am making covert eye contact with the city's shuffling hands under the dinner table. The people are real. I should maybe appreciate my method of preparation- it disables me from translating people as animations. I have to probe them instead. I will probe Paris. It can probe me. A love triangle that flows in an agreeable current.
Love until I say so.
Peter Walker.
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