First in line, a freckled giantess woman, whom I've seen for years, pushes a small wired grocery cart. Once strong and capable, she now shakes pitifully and regards her surroundings with an unsteady look in her eyes.
Next is a young boy with strawberry-blonde hair, a cigarette behind his ear and a black plastic garbage bag thrown over his shoulder. I cannot stop looking at the exquisite downy hair on the back of his neck. He has a delicate, almost-feminine prettiness that he seems to be fighting against with an assumed haughty machoism.
Each goes their separate way as we exit the bus and I head on past the park, the dark storm clouds spilling over the west hills and a light spring rain humidifying the air, neither warm nor cold. It is early afternoon, and I have gotten off work earlier than usual.
As I turn onto my street, a sudden wind lifts the delicate white blossoms out of the cherry trees and scatters them across my view like snowflakes.
Everything natural is a surreal green, and the loamy dank funk of botanical birth permeates the air.
A postman works the houses on one side of the street. His solitary presence seems strangely choreographed.
And on my iPod 'The Hours' soundtrack plays. Phillip Glass's phrases churn and repeat, rise and fall, like a stream of smoke caught in an undulating current of air. It fits perfectly the scene, the smell, the nuances around me.
Melancholy yet lush, hopeful yet crushing, the music recalls the tone of the film and implants itself like a soundtrack on the neighborhood scene around me; yet, similarly intimates the cozy envelopments of literature, times of yore when my face was bowed to the open books of romantics and dejected dreamers.
Like polio or scarlet fever, I carry this antiquated chronic condition with me still: taking in the world in terms of acts, themes and scenarios; characters and settings. Everything has a cinematic quality, even my own solitary foibles, and I think this mode of perception must be dead or nearly so.
Who thinks like this anymore? Who sees?
Everything has become so literal and meaningless. Nuance is lost, or exists in vain. Expressions has been stripped down to a neutered simplicity:
A plus B equals C.
And this shift in contemporary thinking has engendered a kind of hopelessness within literature and the arts, and has mostly driven me away.
I think, what hope is there? This mode of nuanced perception is surely lost.
But then I consider the utter ego in this: surely I am not the only one. As a minority, I suppose it is my duty to keep this mindset alive, despite how isolated and freakish it makes me feel.
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