Reset Forty-Seven, Day Thirty-Four

One of the books I had that burned was a book of writing prompts consisting of photos, and one of the photos was of an old lady sitting at a writing desk with a shawl around her and over her head. So I'm sitting here at the computer with my hoodie pulled over my head and a throw over my shoulders and wrapped around me, and it occurs to me that I must look like that old lady in that photo. I don't think I ever wrote about her. I recall the book had examples of what some writing students had written about the photos, and I remember thinking that one of those about the old lady was pretty good, and that I'd like to be able to write that well.

I'm afraid I still can't, and I have no idea what to say about the guy sitting here in my skin staring at the blank journal entry form on the computer. He probably has a rather dazed look on his face, and I'm pretty sure he'd like a snack, but he doesn't want to get up and fix one, and has no idea what he would fix anyway. I guess he's kind of a dork. I know he slept through most of the evening again, and didn't get up until almost midnight, and his feet are still swollen and sore, and he's not very happy about that. He also has a low-grade headache which probably won't go away until after he has slept again, but he's not very sleepy yet.

One of the things that has him out of sorts is the memory of a fragment of a dream he had Sunday evening. In the dream it was 1963, and he was 18 years old, sitting in a movie house called the Cinema, located on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, and he was watching a movie called Zazie dans le metro. It was a funny movie, a rather surrealist screwball comedy hybrid, about a little girl (Zazie) who spends a few days in Paris with her uncle, a female impersonator, while her mother hoods up with a new lover, and the kid has all sorts of strange encounters with Parisian characters but is perpetually disappointed because all she wanted to do was ride on the Metro, but the Metro is on strike. Toward the end the movie's plot dissolves into absurdist near-chaos and one of the characters is comically disemboweled (I said this was in France, right?) and Zazie finally gets to ride the Metro as the strike ends, but she is asleep when it happens, so she doesn't know it has happened, and she is taken to the train station where she wakes up as her mother retrieves her, and her mother asks her what she did in Paris, and Zazie says "I aged."

Now in the dream this guy is watching the movie, but he slowly wakes up and is now remembering actually seeing the movie, sixty years ago, and now he's half awake remembering Zazie's last line, and as he lies in the chilly darkness of an apartment in the mini-metropolis where he has lived since being burned out of his house, and remembers that it is the first day of a new year, and that things are just as they were the day before, but drastically different from anything in the more distant past, he knows that if anyone asked him what he had done with his life, about all he could say is "I aged."

Then he is sitting at a computer trying to think of something to write, and he keeps thinking about the dream about the event that happened almost sixty years before, and he remembers the audience at the Cinema that night, and how almost all of its members were older than him and that by now almost all of them are surely dead, and he knows that almost all of the actors in the movie Zazie dans le metro are dead, and the world is changed and he's still in it, and he realizes that the odds of him, not being French, being comically disemboweled are vanishingly small, and he is very, very sad. And that's why I can't write about that guy, because he is too sad and utterly ridiculous. And also because I'm old and my brain is too fuzzy and I can't write very well anymore, and I still don't know what to fix for a snack. I wish it was 1963 and the movie was just getting out at the Cinema and on our way home we could stop at Tommy's for cheeseburgers.