Roughly 6 and 1/2 miles above Lac Saint Jean, I am sick of geography as fact and measure. Sick of shuttling back and forth on a moronic loom of money and distance, of the pull between friends and comrades who do not live on the same continent. Each time becomes a lose-win situation: the thought of leaving - particularly, the place where I "do not live", where I am recurring visitor but where I've lost the slight throb of the somewhat strange - saddens, the thought of arriving - where that arriving is supposedly home but is not a city as such, rather an area, a countryside linked by trains and bikes, with couches and houses, one of which is my own according to rent - feels good in spite of it all. Sick of seeing those who matter to me only as a privilege sponsored occasionally by an institution, whether that be educational, financial, or the sneering blur of the two.
Given our mutual reliance on a) variegated landscapes, b) the capacity to leave where we live, at least in name, as necessary respite, and c) the things that employ us, the "let's all move to one city" seems less than likely. Consequently, I therefore propose:
1. the immediate rearrangement of the continents into a new-Pangea glob formation of linked land-masses
2. the subsequent carving out of canals, criss-crossing the land in grids inside curves inside grids, such that water travel regains its deserved primacy
3. the retrofitting of airplanes to become large ice-runners for the winter, to ferry us back and forth across neighborhoods on 747-sized skates
4. meetings to be held out on the enormous resultant ocean that rests uneasy over the rest of the globe
Until then...
Until then it's the to and fro. And, therefore, one of the accidental consequence of airplanes - or at least those that pretend to provide customized entertainment options to each and all individual snowflake/passenger, in an intravessel wrecking of the Kino Train lineage. Namely, that you cannot stop corner of the eye pseudo-watching genuinely terrible films, even as you battle to feign focus on whatever thing of quality you have in front of you. This is made worse by said films being four inches tall (i.e. centipede sized stars engaging in silent witticisms and the smallest explosions possible) and made actually unsettling by being reproduced across a field of vision on multiple monitors without being synchronized, such that without ever actually choosing to watch it, you recurrently see instances from across the duration of a film, out of order, the same scene occurring at different points in time (of your not-watching) and different points in space (first the monitor next to you, then three seats up to the left, then one to the right). You are triangulated by an awful movie. Or, in the this case of tonight, of 8 people in my immediate vicinity simultaneously watching the abhorrent slab of frozen labor that is Life As We Know It, you are frozen in an arcane pattern, somewhere near the edge of an eight-sided figure with no shape, with just the sickening familiarity of having caught that moment - where she seems to say something funny and he seems to realize that he actually loves her despite their irreconcilable difference, we know the scene- in stuttered, hiccuping multiple.
And the way this particular one ends. Our Unfuckable Hotties (note: a distinct anthropological category, increasingly common in late capitalism, namely, the toned, tanned, ripped, sprayed, dishevelled, almost coiffed, slightly next-doorish or barely exotic, one or the other, and banalized beyond the threshold of difference, such that the thought of actual erotic practice is unimaginable, other than the most Sadean excesses: why would anyone put anything into, or take into one's own body any part of, such a null, as it's a purely theoretical hotness) bound together by the child that "was not theirs", learn to kiss late in the game and become the couple they could only be by dint of shared screen time. Through struggling together, through a triangulated third coordinate and the bundle of libido placed on it (which we imagine will ultimately overwhelm it until it is warped into the child of It's Alive), carrying in the tray of cupcakes to the welcoming neighborhood, now successfully a Two to join the rest of the yummy mummies and the tamed sexy dads. And the camera tracks backwards out the front door and swerves up, retreating on a vertical axis from the house, to reveal the trees and green surrounding it, before tilting back and pivoting left, slightly askew, to reveal the City at a distance, rising up from the tree canopy of the suburbs, that other place where they don't belong, for which they won't yearn, close enough to be spurned, near enough for the frisson, far enough from the filth, ready to do sit ups, giggle at the tribulations of child rearing, and spit into each others gaping mouths for the idiot decades to follow.
The very small screen reverts back to the air map. For a moment it loses its signal and shows a line of red traced, and a dotted white line of the path ahead, against a flat black. A coordinateless swamp that does not understand geography. Then it snaps back into configuration, and I see I am halfway from London, halfway to California, 2942 miles to San Francisco, 2401 from London, moving 588 miles per hour while 34,997 feet above the ground.
A hurtling point on a pyramid, casting a diffusing cone of vision from one small rectangle of light to another, tracing a set of lines to those from whom I go, to whom I come. While a meaty child cries and shits itself somewhere nearby, dull people who are not my friends smack their lips, and all space must be collapsed, everywhere and nowhere, none at once.
No comments:
Post a Comment