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Be Afraid
This is the first roof I've ever put on--that is laying of tarpaper and shingles, I only replaced the decking itself on a selective basis: that which was burnt or rotten--and I'm here to say while it is not very complicated, it is pretty damn hard.
And after several weeks of comfortable Rocheblave camping I was the other night visited by horror, in that space between wakefulness and sleep, where one can float, leave the body, even fly, a night phantom grabbed my toes and gave good wiggle, so that my over reaction of swift upward kick and hard downward thrust gave the heel of my right foot a good drubbing against the unfinished wood floor, which I'm sure it deserved for some damn wrong down the road, and my pounding heart reminded me that I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive.
The next day circling the house to inspect for tampering, I came upon a most curious pile of what appears to be yellow rice, under the house. The neatness of the pile and the absence of any carton or plate or other material which might have transported this "rice" adds to the picture, in my mind, a sinister deliberateness. This is not a neat town and I can't conjure an answer to the question of why there is a neat pile of yellow rice under my house. "Upchucked by an animal?," I suggest to myself, hopefully. "Too large for that, and you know it."
The next night, which is last night, Friday, and whereas I used to eschew trips to the dollar show on Friday night because let's face it, it is an act which has "loser" written all over it, but I have come to embrace that, and inhale the air surrounding me which is filled with the exhalations of fellow losers, and get, well, frankly, almost high off it.
But during the excruciatingly poorly written Frequency with Quaid and Cavaciel (sp?), both of whom I really like as actors, I had the time, unfortunately, to leave the reality suspension, and consider the horror which awaited me at Rocheblave. And it began to bug me, scare me. I had embraced the horror, and now it was embracing me. That night, last night, I entered the house scared, and went eventually to sleep, scared.
Today, after my sun up to noon shift on the roof, preparing to leave Rocheblave for various air conditioned hideouts, and I went to contemplate the pile of rice again, came up with nothing, the voice inside me said leave it be, and then, as floating afterthought, I picked up two splinters of wood and laid them as a cross, across the pile.