Doctor's waiting rooms would make anyone feel sick in two hours. I was sporting such a bad headache (and I don’t get headaches, I am a tummy-ache sort of a person) I was ready to cry. Also, the downside of having your iPad full of fun games, magazines and all the bookies you might want to ever read, is that when your iPad is unavailable, the world seems like it’s out to torture you. So much for intellectual addictions.
There was an unsuspecting upside to the whole bacteria-infested happenstance, however … Or at least a curious one. This morning I wrote the chapter in which the power switches back from dDaniel to Mr. Murphy. The issue’s been nagging me for a couple of days now and after I woke up with the clear story in my head, it basically wrote itself. Now Mr. Murphy is back to being the Dream King and dDaniel has been dethroned to Chopin – a sickly, thin boy, unhappy during day hours, creative in music and poetry by night. It may be far from reality, though I think in reality he is simply normal and I have simply taken him as far out as he was on the other side.
My reward for this – and good I am not overly religious, otherwise this would have been a tad too creepy/asskiss even for Dream Gods – was seeing Pumpkin again. Pumpkin. As if THE Pumpkin Prince. I can’t recall the last time I saw him, though I think I was still in the army and I gave him a hug when we met in a grocery store. (Meaning we were less on stalker-stalkee terms that we were when we started, no thanks to my messed up social skills.) Pumpkin was one of the men in my life ten years ago, when I began writing the Zurnizip stories. My sister & Co. would get hungry very late in the night and they would send me out to get pizza from the only place you could get pizza that late. One night, I was hungry myself and waiting and writing in the corner of the Zamorc pub, watching very handsome hands indeed, doing a strange little dance folding a bunch of pizza boxes. Only later did I look up to find a face of the handsomest boy I’ve ever seen: one with an olive skin of a Balkan teen, sharp nose, even sharper cheekbones, pout mouth and dangerous, deep and dark amber eyes… For years I would follow him around for places we went to get our drinks at – he would shift jobs often, so when we asked ourselves where to tonight, the answer would usually simply be ‘where’s Pumpkin working these days?’… I attempted to initiate a friendship often enough, probably seriously (tastelessly) imposing on him when clearly he was too polite to tell me straight off, and I can only dread what my friends did to do the same on my behalf in hope of getting me laid. The man probably thought I was a sad, fat, nerdy little loon, but still I think in the end we spoke like two human beings. If I ever got to have him, I probably wouldn’t have half a clue what to do with him, but the thought of him always, ever made me feel full of hot, fast, thin bright red blood. Not to mention he inspired one of my best picture books.
Took me a while to realize it’s him when I saw him. If he recognized or even remembered me, I can’t say, and it’s not that I blame him, I’ve looked better; possibly out of range of sterile neon lights.) I had no idea he’s still in this town (though, frankly, where else would he be?). Not all of his boyish, cursed-prince-of-a-savage-land looks were gone. He was a man now, slightly taller, thicker than I remembered, with thinning black hair and a shock of eyelashes and a large Bosnian nose over a thinner, larger mouth. Don’t get me wrong – still a well enough looking man, but – not a golden-eyed boy from my stories. In fact I only began to recognize him, because he got upset at the nurse (he was always like that, bit primitive, bit too quick to get aggressive) and after he left all the old women began saying how rude he was. Riiight. As if they weren’t all wishing he was rude to them. (Not that I’m defending him, I’m just saying that after two hours of being sent back and forth for dumb reasons when you’re sick, your mind starts going ‘fuck this’ and you want to throttle the next person that treats you like you’re less than shit because they are the ones sitting down and you’re the one having to stand.)
Funny how some people, as real people, fall so completely out of your memory, regardless of how very important they were for your creativity when you were young … And funny indeed how real people just don’t seem like a good enough reason to rejoin Facebook.
There was an unsuspecting upside to the whole bacteria-infested happenstance, however … Or at least a curious one. This morning I wrote the chapter in which the power switches back from dDaniel to Mr. Murphy. The issue’s been nagging me for a couple of days now and after I woke up with the clear story in my head, it basically wrote itself. Now Mr. Murphy is back to being the Dream King and dDaniel has been dethroned to Chopin – a sickly, thin boy, unhappy during day hours, creative in music and poetry by night. It may be far from reality, though I think in reality he is simply normal and I have simply taken him as far out as he was on the other side.
My reward for this – and good I am not overly religious, otherwise this would have been a tad too creepy/asskiss even for Dream Gods – was seeing Pumpkin again. Pumpkin. As if THE Pumpkin Prince. I can’t recall the last time I saw him, though I think I was still in the army and I gave him a hug when we met in a grocery store. (Meaning we were less on stalker-stalkee terms that we were when we started, no thanks to my messed up social skills.) Pumpkin was one of the men in my life ten years ago, when I began writing the Zurnizip stories. My sister & Co. would get hungry very late in the night and they would send me out to get pizza from the only place you could get pizza that late. One night, I was hungry myself and waiting and writing in the corner of the Zamorc pub, watching very handsome hands indeed, doing a strange little dance folding a bunch of pizza boxes. Only later did I look up to find a face of the handsomest boy I’ve ever seen: one with an olive skin of a Balkan teen, sharp nose, even sharper cheekbones, pout mouth and dangerous, deep and dark amber eyes… For years I would follow him around for places we went to get our drinks at – he would shift jobs often, so when we asked ourselves where to tonight, the answer would usually simply be ‘where’s Pumpkin working these days?’… I attempted to initiate a friendship often enough, probably seriously (tastelessly) imposing on him when clearly he was too polite to tell me straight off, and I can only dread what my friends did to do the same on my behalf in hope of getting me laid. The man probably thought I was a sad, fat, nerdy little loon, but still I think in the end we spoke like two human beings. If I ever got to have him, I probably wouldn’t have half a clue what to do with him, but the thought of him always, ever made me feel full of hot, fast, thin bright red blood. Not to mention he inspired one of my best picture books.
Took me a while to realize it’s him when I saw him. If he recognized or even remembered me, I can’t say, and it’s not that I blame him, I’ve looked better; possibly out of range of sterile neon lights.) I had no idea he’s still in this town (though, frankly, where else would he be?). Not all of his boyish, cursed-prince-of-a-savage-land looks were gone. He was a man now, slightly taller, thicker than I remembered, with thinning black hair and a shock of eyelashes and a large Bosnian nose over a thinner, larger mouth. Don’t get me wrong – still a well enough looking man, but – not a golden-eyed boy from my stories. In fact I only began to recognize him, because he got upset at the nurse (he was always like that, bit primitive, bit too quick to get aggressive) and after he left all the old women began saying how rude he was. Riiight. As if they weren’t all wishing he was rude to them. (Not that I’m defending him, I’m just saying that after two hours of being sent back and forth for dumb reasons when you’re sick, your mind starts going ‘fuck this’ and you want to throttle the next person that treats you like you’re less than shit because they are the ones sitting down and you’re the one having to stand.)
Funny how some people, as real people, fall so completely out of your memory, regardless of how very important they were for your creativity when you were young … And funny indeed how real people just don’t seem like a good enough reason to rejoin Facebook.
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