Dr. Word

Haven't posted in a while. I fell off both my November challenges and started feeling crappy, guilty, fat. Lost motivation to apply to jobs, didn't return phone calls, that sort of thing. I'm feeling better today though. I went on a bike adventure around Seatoun. Found this black sand beach and a cliff to climb in the near future and the most amazing elementary school ever. These kids don't know how good they have it. Their school is nestled in between gorgeous grassy hills and the sea, and is made out of beach-faded wood in odd shapes and cubbyholes, with port windows. Rich but also rustic, like a pirate ship. I also rode to the Chocolate Fish and ate some granola while reading a fantastic Iain Banks sci-fi novel, Feersum Endjinn. Came home just now and found the cleaners still here. Guess they're having a slow day. Not too concerned (I used to get real nervous being home when they were here, something strange about the upper/lower class relationship, and I also feel in the way). I'm going through my hard drive right now and I found this strange story from 2003 about a man who is only cognizant on Saturdays. The story starts off sounding like I wrote it, but as it goes on it sounds more and more polished. Also, I can't remember writing it. Has anyone ever read this? I'll paste it at the bottom of this entry. I'm just so confused. It's incomplete, and google can't find it anywhere.

Oh yeah, I got my hair dyed purple and pink. I was at the salon for 4 hours and spent $250 NZ! But that's like $3 Canadian so it's all good. It seriously looks amazing but I really can't justify that kind of extravagance again. With that money I could buy: 1.5 months student loan payments, a few pairs of desperately needed pants, a used bike, a cross country plane ticket, Christmas presents for everyone..... I do feel rather good though, have to say. The salon peeps were so excited, apparently crazy colors are a rare occurrence and a couple of them hung around towards the end just gushing about my hair and getting me cups of tea while Amy the fantastic and funky stylist blow-dried. Here, have a picture:



Tonight we are going to attempt to wrap up filming. I will furiously edit it together before coming home and might even have a copy with a questionable level of polish to show you all. That would be neat. Also, an affordable present come to think of it.

All right, here’s that story. I would be honored to have written it (I just went through and corrected many spelling errors that are in line with my usual
errors, so maybe I did write it?!?!?!) :



There once was a man with a strange mental illness. He was perfectly reasonable on Saturdays, but the other six days of the week he was mute and dumb. Even more peculiarly, he could not remember a thing that had happened to him for the past week when questioned about the week on Saturday. For a long time his condition puzzled doctors everywhere, until he finally through his hands in the air one Saturday afternoon and said, “Enough! I’m going home and reading a good book.”

And so he did. He was actually quite brilliant on Saturdays and worked on math problems during his spare time. Unfortunately he didn’t have much spare time because of his limited “awake” time, as it were. And no one would hire him on a regular basis because of his lack of availability during the working week. So he lived with his mother, a kind, rather gray, woman. She bathed him and fed him during the week and on Saturdays he drove her to the park or the cinema or perhaps the city if she was feeling adventurous. And sometimes Universities hired out his mathematical skills for short periods of time, or invited him to be a guest lecturer for weekend conferences up in New England.

This man often tried to stay up as late as possible on Saturdays, for obvious reasons, and found it lengthened his clarity up to a certain point. However, if he tried to push it much further he invariably felt his mind “slipping away,” as he called it, which he found most disturbing. And so he let it be. Life was pleasant and too short too waste, especially when one considers that his conscious life would be at most 15 years long.

Unfortunately, life can never stay the same for too long. There are always car accidents and wars and love to deal with. His mother was out for a walk on a Thursday evening when she had the misfortune to tango with a tow truck. The truck immerged unharmed but she, alas, died immediately. Now he was not completely unprepared for such a disaster. His local physician was a primary contact in case of Ms. Graybells’s death, and so the police called up the physician Thursday evening just after the 10 o’clock news had started. However, this physician had recently flown to Thesaloniki, Greece to visit his anti-capitalist nephew, who had been badly wounded in a gathering of anarchist protestors the previous Saturday.

The second person the police tried to contact was also listed as a primary contact. Her name was Sheila Birk and she ran the used bookstore down the street from Ms. Graybell’s house. Sheila was a hard woman, stern with the shoplifters and even sterner with people who left books open and upside down on tables. Still, she must have had a soft spot in her heart somewhere because that Tuesday she was working in her bookstore alone…

…

And then it was Saturday. Peter opened his eyes and yawned loudly. He realized that he was quite thirsty. Upon further examination he noticed that he had wet himself. He was sitting in an enormous puddle of his own filth. It was a bit worse than that but we shall not elaborate on the details here. He stroked his chin, which was covered in a fair amount of stubble, and decided that something terrible had happened.

End.

There's a lot of weird stuff on this hard drive. I used to make a lot more voice recordings than I do now, diary entries, song snippets, monotonous self-harmonizing like Enya but without the new age.....