BIROCO.COM ~ Talking nonsense in pubs

Talking nonsense in pubs

JULY 27 03

Spent some of the afternoon sitting in the garden in the sun, watching butterflies and musing on the tireless devotion of insects in pollinating the flowers. Something on my mind, at the back of it, like why did tears spontaneously well up and stream down my face when discussing angels with Hogan last night in Nambucca. Soaking wet from traipsing down Holloway Road in the pouring rain, half a bottle of Rémy Martin and several lagers consumed round Hogan's before we even hit the road. I have a vague recollection of saying, just before the tears came:

'Angels will weep when I die.'

It's all mixed up in fragmentary memories, a patchwork of rain-sodden sleeves, rain in sodium street-lights hitting the pavement like a Will Eisner storm scene framed by the open doorway, an arm-wrestling contest to decide some matter of theological obscurity, cognacs, Rakis, some Turkish girl earlier in the Cactus Bar setting fire to something with the glowing charcoal from the nargile, me turning round and seeing a pretty-girl-panic in a cloud of smoke, funny in its way, and that old familiar state of consciousness where 'God' speaks through you, I remember 'God' told Hogan through my mouth:

'You're not listening to the angels.'

Hogan has this attentive puppy-dog look when 'God' speaks, even through a sinner like me. There was something – look this is through a booze haze right – about – and I'm straining my memory here – about angels not having choice and therefore Lucifer was not an angel, says he, not me, earlier in the evening. So I say well accepting your doctrinal assertion that angels don't have choice maybe Lucifer didn't have choice either in what he did.

So later soaking wet this bloody angels thing cropped up again.

So anyway, something there, at the back of my mind from last night, sitting in the garden, watching the insects and strangely fixated by the red and reddening tomatoes. But I'm not at peace, inexplicably not, not in the way of so many times before not, and I'm thinking I just need a breathing space to dwell upon nothing in particular, but it seems held back from me as if by a high security fence around a place of no importance guarding nothing of any interest. A fence around anything is a fence around everything outside of it too, taking the rest of the world into consideration. And sometimes that rest of the world is pretty small, and the birds are chirping only rusty wheelbarrow construction site chirps, having forgotten their open countryside chirps forever.

I don't know what I'm saying, all I know is that today I bleached out the tea-stained sink and have a week's worth of dirty dishes in it now with the water getting cold, and I have dust half an inch thick in the bathroom and spiders' webs even on my toothpaste, which I noticed this morning. And I think, why will angels weep when I die?