I.It’s right in the same instant I take my sunglasses off and enter the hangar where the aircraft museum is located: Looking into the abyss and a decommissioned Mig-17 gazes also. Something like that. They fought in Vietnam. Those Mig-17s fought in Vietnam and their younger brothers fought over Korea.
“This is so cool,” I whisper to no one as I walk past the Migs: There’s a Mig-17 and a Mig-15 and also a Mig-21, which was one of my favorite jet planes back when I was a kid. I even built Mig-21 models then asked dad to hang them from the ceiling over my bed. That was a long time ago, close to twenty years, and this is now.
II.A week earlier and it’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m at another museum, this one very close to my place and Daimler Chrysler is sponsoring this weird Bauhaus exhibit but I’m a little bit
too wasted on too many screwdrivers to really grasp anything. A neon-and-glass abstract sculpture captures my attention for a split second then exits from the corner of my (blurred, slurred) mind’s eye. Eternity lasts for but a couple of seconds.
Last time I was here was too see some furniture straight off Sigmund Freud’s pad in Vienna, I think, there around mid-2000 or something, with
you of all people, then we went to the movies to see that one where Elizabeth Hurley played the devil.
I get into the elevator and head to the upper floor, above the thronging avenue underneath, and then I freeze for close to a half-hour before this Hieronimus Bosch painting showing some Catholic saint or another being tempted by a guy who looks like an orange bill-faced Darth Vader into going to the dark side of the force or something like that. I start giggling for no good reason.
III.In-between those two weeks I’m taking five days off work at my parents’ place and more often than not on the phone with A**** trying to patch things up but to no real avail. I also buy a
Depeche Mode DVD and manage to stick to repeating the
first song for the remainder of the days (I just can’t seem to get enough of it, what can you do…), then waste away whatever has remained by going to half-successful job interviews, browsing for Internet p*rn and reading some lousy Dave Eggers novel, the newer one, about the kid from Sudan, and Arthur Clarke’s
2010: Odyssey Two, even though I end up thinking the movie much better.
IV.I slip into those sneakers and as opposed to what that Orthopedic surgeon old me earlier this year my knees do
not give in against the asphalt.
Sure, I’m still hiking as opposed to actually jogging but it’s a start.
V.The
duration ends with the oddest of nightmares: I’m at G****’s place and she’s just been adopted (at age 27!) by this family which are real loaded,
rich, and G**** invites me over and for some reason or another wants to have sex with me then & there. But then as in most good things, turns out her foster parents are devil worshippers: “My father wants me to have your seed,” she tells me in my dream. I’m not kidding. She actually spoke that very line in my dream.
“Dude that’s so not gonna happen,” I reply as I slip back my pants on. “Besides have you realized your foster family are all named after
Moonlighting characters?”
Now this is true: Her foster parents and siblings were indeed named after characters from
Moonlighting in my nightmare.
G**** is, of course, getting married in a couple of weeks. I bought her some expensive, vertical fan.
It’s my own way of dealing with it.
