Kettle

The woman in green was narrating a story. Some story. 

You were high but aware; that's one of the things that annoyed you about yourself. She must be a nice person. Her friends seem to pay attention. One of them seems hot.

She says she's got a song for everyone in the room. She stops at you second. She says something you can't follow. They'd assumed you were stoned. But others' reek isn't a problem of intoxication. They can't be expected to know that. They seem like happy people.

Incompleteness

She wasn't really the talking type.

He told her his pursuit was noble. It took half that sentence for him to be embarrassed by it. 

She was noble. That he had established; by definition. All else was unprovable.

He wanted to ask if her fist was full of clay.

Tell me more

She gave him a patient hearing. She always did that. After all, a person who had things to say, even if in bad faith, had things to say. He had a way of making his pettiness seem grand. Neither of them were sure if this was owing to his ability or because she had politely let it pass all those years ago and it'd assumed a character of its own. But it made the conversation appear elevated and burying their incompetence was a mutual goal anyway. Short term-ism isn't just a corporate phenomenon, he'd say; in the conversation itself, the self referencing will have passed for abstraction.

Reading gives the reader too much space. That must be why he had issues with writing. 

Others' reek

You have double parked your auto on a rather busy section of Sardar Patel Road. The man in the car wants to make a right; instead he makes noises that stem from righteous indignation. Smug motherfucker. You yell back and call him random names as a reflex. He stops and smiles back. You take the abuse up a notch, walk up and dare him to step out.  He does. And stands upright. The smile breaking into laughter is designed to insult; you know that. You dare him further to hit you. He gives it thought.

Yesterday reeks in the rum of your breadth. He must have smelt it too.

You were talking to the crowd. He was still contemplating the dare. He shows shame. That should teach him. 

Same Result, Faster

Or, if David Foster Wallace had lived in Madras he'd have died earlier.

The Wall

It always seems to be a physical thing. It's vast and one doesn't see the either ends of it. But it's still an object, one would think; infinitude does not disqualify object status, does it? The question one is left with however is, while everything on this side is dark, why is it even visible? It's stone. Is that implication of light an exponentially decreasing function? 

A dead daughter and a forgotten thought

I forget the name of that William Wordsworth poem where he poignantly points to the paradox of human grief: on losing his daughter Dora, he assures himself that time is a true healer but is so shattered when he realizes that in that process he remembers less of her.

He being who he is wrote it well enough; I am sure scholars have dissected that work better than I can.  I thought it was worth pointing to, as an analogy: thoughts that consume one's vacant isolated nights at times deserve better than being abandoned after Zoloft.