By Jennifer Firestone
This is a demon that can take a grown brain and squash it to sponge. There is no loving the state
of a decrepit mind that encourages a decrepit body. Is he sleeping or just not there? States of
awareness flicker inside a gauzy lens. We’ve seen this before—in a film, the man disappearing
as he stands right there, his body stolid.
Let’s say this man worked as an Assistant Principal and admired his own IQ.
Let’s say this man had a brutish body but was not a brute. All of this becomes portraiture but
there can be fractures of truth. Looking at him you think: Am I in this film or is this a vapory
memory? Has the world tilted so that language and bodily gestures are disproportionately
discordant?
The demon called you and said, “Is this the son I hate?” The demon called the
police and said the doormat in front of the door has shifted. The demon called and said,
they are coming up from the floor, boring through and will take me. The demon locked the
nursing assistants in the room so they couldn’t get out. The demon said someone was
giving him arsenic. The demon hid his key, his phone, his TV remote control. The demon took
his sleep throughout the night.
This is not the way you’d like a man to rethink his masculinity. This is not a classic film.
The disappearing doesn’t equate to some great morality. It doesn’t end with a finishing
shine. There’s a moose he said, there’s a moose over there, and we look in the corner
where the sun pokes through.
Something about my brain says art and then cringes because translation is obscure.
Because a demon is unknown. Because interpretation reveals our own
limitations. But the language the man speaks is poetry—
reams of syllables severing and re-joining, rivers of sounds unhinged.
Snowy strings of sentences, databases malfunctioning. A static on the screen
that is audible. Dear demon, this film is reeling, becoming my memory, thickened with
my brain. The falseness of my image of this man is creating itself right now.
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I had a fasting blood draw to check my sugars scheduled for 10:30 Friday morning, so I took it easy in the morning since I couldn't eat anything, then of course wound up waiting over 20 minutes for the lab, and none of the parking machines in the lab building were working so I had to walk to another building, and I got stuck in the nightmare that is currently that complex's parking lot which has two entrance/exits closed, and long story short I was was so hungry and cranky that I went straight to the mall and had Indian food for brunch. My father spotted me in the food court, so I took a walk with him, and then I did two Pokemon raids in the park nearby, at which point I had calmed down!
The rest of my day was fairly mellow, since I did not have a lot of energy. I got some work done at home, took longer trying to cancel a Sears credit card (since there's no longer a Sears anywhere near here) than it took me to open it and use it, then we had dinner with my parents. We came home and binged the last several episodes of Good Omens, which was awesome in every way, from the gay angel/demon love story to the crack history to the Doctor Who references to the use of Queen in the soundtrack to the big-name guest stars. I want a sequel so badly, I know Neil Gaiman said absolutely not but I can hope! From the Puffin Express tour sailing from Reykjavik, lots of seabirds:
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