My toothache, an abscess I am sure, has become my entire existence. The toothache is an entity of its own, separate yet consuming my entire self. It is shaped like a bowling pin with a ten watt Christmas bulb at the top and a 300 watt bulb at the bottom. It pulsates and flashes, red and yellow, sometimes fiery, sometimes dull, but omnipresent. I'm not the only one with a toothache,everyone seems to be getting them. Besides the toothache, there is the hunger, the constipation, the bugs (fleas, I think), the dirt, the difficult-to-flush toilet, the crooked bathroom doors that never close, the ripped mattresses, the greedy, cheating attitudes even between friends, The fakeness.
There is also the freshness, the beauty and simplicity, the sharingness and openness, the friendliness, the deliciousness of food (when we have any), the coldness of water, the glory of a good night's sleep (who am I kidding? when do we sleep?), the patterns and variations of people, no hang-ups about nakedness, just talking and touching.
Mentioning parts of the day does not describe the day. Mentioning bugs does not give a full picture of waking up itching with crawly things in your hair and clothes, biting you, running around on you, or of trying to catch them and pinch them, not knowing for sure if the are just ants or something awful. And there is no way to describe the mixture of sex smells and dirt smells and spoiled food smells. The mattresses, filthy and ripped, are lying on the floor. No one attempts to walk around them, barefooted or shod. They clamber over them from the bathroom or the hacked-on, peed-on streets. Clothes are dirty, bodies are dirty, though baths do happen. My soap was stolen--soap is very rare, like food and toothpaste. Books on drugs and the drugs themselves are the most visible (and invisible) things around. Poor diets, weariness and fatigue, sleeping in fits. Never any silence. Barking dogs, loud radios, loud voices day and night.
Girls, including me, seem, for the most part, to be more hung-up than boys on morality, virginity, sex, morals, dirt and so on. The boys are the ones pushing free love. The girls aren't all that eager. But now there are bongo drums and guitars, people sing and play, whistle. A real good scene, no hang-ups.
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Also posted to The Unbearable Darkness of Being at 8/08/2006 10:15:40 AM
Note: this is part of an ongoing project where I am working on several new novels at once. Each one has a keyword. The keyword of this novel is "Goat." Hopefelly when I have time, I will collect these together and use them for RESEARCH and background for the novel. This is not fiction, this is a real journal entry.
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