ninetynine hot air balloons

[aslant]

it is the hottest day of the year. the hottest. day. i'm thinking there must be a clever name for this day, but so far i haven't heard one.

in italy, the coldest, most brutal day of the year is called il giorno del corvo, which means the day of the raven, or of the crow. they don't really make a distinction between the two. when i was there, il giorno del corvo was accompanied by a week of inexplicable phenomenon. giant blocks of ice had begun falling from the sky. i remember breaking ice crystals off of my scarf where my breath had fallen.

yesterday beside the sidewalk one of the small brown quick-bodied birds had fallen dead, its wings forming a little protected shell around its body, which was filled with maggots and bright black squirming flies.

last night it was so hot i could barely sleep. r called and we talked a while; i sensed something sharp or maybe brittle beneath our words, unspoken things. when we hung up i listened to loveline and tried to feel sleepy, impossible since i'd napped for almost three hours, five to eight pm. i could not sleep. i needed desperately to sleep, to escape the constant awareness of heat. i asked antony to tell me a story, sing me a song, to help me sleep. but it didn't work. i slept upsidedown in the bed so my head was near the window fan, but could not shake the feeling that i was not in my real sleeping position. so i kept waking up. pajamas were impossible: but otherwise i had a constant sensation of a loose hair tickling my collar bone, or a small bug landing on me. paranoically brushing away at my shoulders every half-second.

when i woke up from my nap, earlier, i had the strangest of unformed dreams. waking up i felt i was being called to end my twoness. as if someone from the realm of one had noticed me and said i was worth it, i could be one now, too. and gratefully rolling toward the dim window feeling i had left behind my twoness.

Comments

elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

twoness? oneness? explain.

I did sing to you :) in my sleep, sort of. but I was whisper-singing your song to you as I went to sleep.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

in the dream two/one had to do with a class system. like twoness was servant-level, because we had to be one person for the royalty, another person for ourselves. but royalty got to be oneness all the time. but this was all i could understand in the two seconds before my brain woke back up. but of course it also has a lot to do with the twoness i was telling you about before: living one life in email/lj/telephone and another walking around in the boston world.

the phone did a one-ring thing again and i thought it was you. but no dice. no one there.

in my heat delirium i kept rolling over and telling you i was too miserable to sleep. i remember this. waking up constantly.

/sings it's too damn hot!
i know you don't like jazz, but it's just too appropriate.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

ok, well you are oneness. and importantness. and jess. :)

do you hate being called jess? tell me.

every time I wake up I cuddle you and whisper to you. it's getting more and more like you're there.

it's coldcoldcold here. because it knows I'm going out tonight.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

no, i like being called jess :) i only let close friends do that. plus it sounds lovely when you say it.

although i did read something disturbing in that book about the word jess. some messed up shit: that a jess is the hood that restrains the falcon. or the cord that ties it to someone's arm. which has disturbing implications. but i don't think of it that way at all. at all.

call me jes. you make it sound very continental, and unamerican. i like that :)

i want it to be cold here, more than anything, almost.

it will be nice to be able to sleep like that for real. and have someone to talk to in the middle of the night.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

that's not a bad thing. that keeps the falcon close and looked after. but I like jess, it sounds nice :)

jess, sounds like an english name. do you want me to spell it with just one s so you keep your exoticness? :)

it is too cold here, I am not looking forward to going out now. perhaps we'll just go to leicester square and aquire people. we might find a nice french girl for olivier.

it will be nice to sleep like that. it'll be the everything-clicks-into-place moment.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

i think maybe i like jess better than jes, because jes is how my mom spells it, which annoys me. i don't know why.

i'm picturing this poor french guy being dragged all over freezing cold london with people he can't really talk to. does your sister talk to him? or what? how does that work? since you can't remember all your french? how do you communicate?

why why why? i am four years old today w/ all these questions.

did you see my other update :) good news...

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

ok, jess then. done.

I can speak french, I just have real difficulty starting a conversation with him. I have holes in vocabulary everywhere. he's a nice guy, and he likes drum n bass and jungle etc... so hopefully once he has a few beers down him in a club he'll chill out a bit - but I think the french equivalent of our clubs is much more immature.

be four years old, and I'll take you to the fair and buy you a candy floss.

I didn't - I will look

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

a candy floss :) that must be cotton candy, i think. to the fair! to the fair! oh yes please.

i think the french equivalent of any other country's entertainment is immature. bored sophists, they. too many hard-thinking intellectuals have poisoned the water. just think how difficult it is just to pick out cheese at the store. calvino wrote about that--getting nervous at the sophisticated selection in cheese shops, then panicking and getting the most boring, pedestrian varieties of cheese. cultural panic attack.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

cotton candy - yes. the fair comes to hastings once a year, it's very small, but I like it.

haha - it is difficult to pick cheese :) and wine.

my cheese didn't turn up, or my shampoo. but everything else came. I ate most of the sushi already. khalid was unimpressed!

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

there was a fair in swansea when we had our homestay on the england trip. i was horrified to see that they didn't require the (tiny) rides to have seatbelts. kids were sitting up and playing around with the gravity on this spinning thing. i was scared it would stop suddenly and they would all be flung off to their deaths.

unimpressed with the sushi? what kind was it?

i don't drink french wine much. i like being able to pick out italian wine because i recognize the town names. i'm good at finding good cheap ones. french wines are always priced several dollars higher, even if they're shit. it's a crappy way to run the market, i think. poor italians.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

noooo, the gravity thing is great! if you had seatbelts it would spoil it completely. and they don't just stop - they warn you when it starts to slow down. when we were in amsterdam for new years, they had a huge millennium clock, that was also a ferris wheel, and it was so rickety, I thought it was going to fall aprt. and mike kept swinging it. was only funny when we got off it.

it was just sushi - but he's not an adventurous eater. we had a big arguement about eating snails too.

poor italians. I'm not really a connoisseur of wine, but I know how to taste it properly.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

snails. mmm.

tell me again where khalid is from? or carling. whatever.

but the spinny thing looked really scary. it was a cute fair, though. it felt like we were in a story book. everything all laid out on the little green commons, so cute.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

khalid - afghanistan, I think. but I could be very very wrong. something that ends in "an".

yes, that sounds like the hastings fair. cute. haha. it's big to us.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

you should come to oregon next may. we have the rose festival. there are three or four huge parades with rose queens and princesses, and a giant fair at the waterfront park that is HUGE and filled with rides and games. and elephant-ear vendors, and such. it will be so fun.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

elephant ear vendors? huh?

yes, it sounds good :) we'll go.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

elephant ears--large rounds of dough, bigger than your head almost. and covered in different kinds of sugar, or with jam or nutella in the middle. absolute gluttony. and so fun to eat. you get covered in sugar, it's impossible not to.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

haha. sounds very nice. very french, actually. such terrible self indulgence.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

:) i would like to see anyone try to eat one without looking like a total child. it's impossible. elephant ears are the great equalizers for society. oregon is a very happy and equal place because of elephant ears. not very french at all.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

haha.
peace through dough and sugar.

do you know they are cloning humans now?

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

this very second? who? that disturbs me a little bit. how scary.

i mean, it's a good thing, but i don't think we're far enough along yet to get it right. they'll come out all weak and sick. it happened with the sheep, too, and that wasn't even proper cloning.

how do you know they're doing this? i should read the news more often, i suppose. the news seems boring these days. i've got you on my mind, mostly.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a good thing, because we can't do it right yet, and a country - I forget which one - just decided they were going to do it anyway.

the sheep they cloned developed obesity and an attitude problem. how do they know it won't happen to people? what about if they are so mutated they are in pain, and it would be our fault? I don't think we have the right to do that.

I don't usually watch the news, but I saw that. everyone was getting really angry with this guy, and saying he shouldn't do what he was doing. but he's just going to do it anyway.

I think about you most of the time too. and I try to relate everything to us, I spook myself a little.

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

how coincidental that they just announced that new star wars title as well--attack of the clones. i expect there will be lots of jokes about that this week on the news...

how do you relate everything to us? don't be spooked. i think you're just...dedicated. in a very sweet way.

Re: elaborate

[booshtukka.livejournal.com]

is the new star wars film called that? shame. sounds kinda cheesy.

I just do, I think - we'll do that one day, or jesse and I would laugh over that, stuff like that. I always think of us as an item, that's been together forever. I dunno...

Re: elaborate

[aslant.livejournal.com]

:) yeah. thinking of stuff that will be better/different when we're not across the ocean from each other.

george lucas was saying it was supposed to evoke a return to the playful nature of the originals. hmf. i agree--it's totally cheesy. like attack of the killer tomatoes or something.