Mikarrhea

Snowe job

OK, so what's with last weekend? Well, it doesn't merit the delay. If I wasn't getting gentle-but-palpable noodges from some corners, I'd let it bob merrily off in our wake, scarcely worth the effort of retrieval, let alone resuscitation. But, whatever --a million years ago I spent a sunny October afternoon sparkling around Boston Harbor, practicing person-overboard (ok, pfd-overboard) drills in a day-sail sloop: I've a vague memory of the figure eight maneuver involved.

It begins, I think, by bearing onto a reach and tacking away a certain number of boat lengths from who- or whatever just fell into the water, so you have enough room to jibe around and enough wind to bring you back to the right spot in one smooth pass.

Mindful of the value of preliminary divagation, to recapture last weekend I should probably invoke Lucy Snowe and sail back a couple of boatlengths of weekends previous. Whatever else I may have forgotten about Villette, and it's basically everything except the protagonist-narrator and two or three other characters, I'll carry to the gates of senility the memory that twice during the novel, which otherwise faithfully follows the amble of several years of unremarkable existence in a quiet French town, Lucy Snowe turns directly to the dear reader and admits she hasn't been exactly honest. Remember several weeks ago, when she had described that perfectly uneventful afternoon? Well, it turns out that something really crucial to the story transpired just then, but she didn't feel like troubling dear reader with it at the time.

Say what? Um, Lucy, why narrate to the reader your confessing to a lie? Who would know the difference? You could just as easily make up a lie that you don't confess to -- rearrange the chronology however to suit your narratorial purpose -- how could we catch you out? Or go back and change what you said so you're not concealing anything. For all we know, after all, everything you tell us is a lie. I mean, you're a fucking fictional character!

Narratorial mendacity by omission--while nowhere near as culpable as the out-and-out lies of the narrator of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?-- is mendacity nevertheless. Whatever it may amount to ontologically with respect to a fictional narrator, it's the weedlike bane of the friend-blessed narrator's personal blog.

OK, so a bunch of entries ago, I described the evening we played Trivial Pursuit at Mia's & how I got all I'm drunk and want to make out with everybody and Sherman got all respect my limits, bitch. One sentence in my post was not as truthful as it could have been: "As we were leaving, I gave Eliza a really unconstrained kiss & it made me happy that she was, well, very polite in enduring it good humoredly." The words following "she was, well" might be better emended to read "evidently willing to collaborate wholeheartedly in a transaction something like this: one girl dangles a nylon line and another holds a lighter to its end."

The point isn't which girl's who. It's that at that moment we're both the little melting cerebellum in the flame.

I gave Sherman time to drive Eliza home and say goodnight. Too much time, obviously: her windows were totally dark. Re-dressed, she brought out beers from the fridge & we sat on her couch. It was like 2:00. I called Greta, who was drinking whiskey with her brother at their parents' house sixty miles away, and told her I was at home and had fed the cats, which made her happy 'cuz she'd been worried about my driving. Eliza's hair was down, which was distracting. We drank beer, made out, talked, made out, decided we were staying at second, drove to Mobil mart for cigarettes, and eventually splashed into bed from all directions for hours. Had Greta been there with us the night before, everything would've happened pretty much the same, we assured each other before I left to get my kids for the day. This wouldn't go into the blog, at least not unless everyone was comfortable.

When I told her everything that night, Greta wasn't comfortable. We were sitting quietly in our living room, but it seemed we were veering --a helluva lot faster than we would have been, even in daylight, through a canyon in our own country.