Post Xmas Dinner and I’m in a weird psychic space. It’s that kind of place where the lethargy of it all will set in soon enough, but not yet. Where the idea of the world waking up (remember the end of Pynchon’s Against The Day?), is just the vaguest notion of something. Not quite yet, but the idea of it will be solid soon enough.
Right now the mood feels exactly like forcing my hand into picking out a Muddy Waters album (I’m Ready or maybe Hard Again), and reading Otomo’s Akira. A good, strange brew, and heady.
What I instead have in front of me is Van Morrison’s 1986 album No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, and a copy of Bryant Simon’s Everything But The Coffee. Not that I’m reading right now, it’s still too soon after dinner for that kind of thing to be pointedly antisocial. But ‘A Town Called Paradise’, is just about to round its last corner and sitting with a mobile device, intermittently (ostensibly) “updating my Twitter” seems to be just the right kind of social-but-distant, present-but-not-quite-immersed.
Although the room is bustling, and there’s more than enough noise flooding in from elsewhere in the house, it’s as if I can hear the Romeo Y Julietta cigars slowly drawing to ash. I have an RYJ too, steadily balanced on the edge of an oversized ashtray in the shape of a tiny medieval village scene, with a hilltop castle overlooking the edge of town, the hollowed out middle where one ashes colored to be taken as a river.
This is all starting to feel like a pantomime. Pretty soon, even the steady, accessible prose of Simon’s book will begin to seem like and adventure. There’s a silence lurking just behind the bustle. But it’s a silence on tilt, and ultimately one kept at bay. Truly, the most wonderful time of the year.
