Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Trite and True

While on occasion I find it fit to, shall we say, contort some of the more insignificant facts of the otherwise Honest To God pieces I put before you (for the record, I always put You before any of the pieces; they are but disposable oddities, dissipating daily in a huff of ill-assembled ones and zeros; you are living, breathing, panting organisms, with like eight arms), I am always, without exception*, completely cock-in-pants faithful to the Heart Of The Matter — like all true loggers. Not for me the petty twisting of important details; not for me the sandbox realms of pure fiction; and not for me the hazy middle ground of — oog, I feel sick — ambiguity. Like all people who think they're artists, I stand for truth: the truth of experience. It's all very well and good to wave statistics and graphs and pictures of people reading controversial 20th century novels, but that does not pierce the capital-T, my plums; to do that, you need sapient fingers and bad eyes.

Case in point: my sister, Ointment (vindictive nickname rather than vindictive parents), two years my junior, wandered listlessly into the kitchen, curling her hair around a brush that for all intents and purposes was an extension of her hand. Ever the adolescent, she grimaced at me through hoary black lips and bee-lined for the coffee-grinder. For someone with such a vulgar personality, she always looked very doable first thing in the morning, before she'd had a chance to suffocate her better features beneath tragic black leather and obscene buckles. Such a waste. I wondered idly when that godawful phase would end and crossed my legs.
"Where's the milk?" she asked accusingly.
"At the shop." I relished the moment, having earlier been overly liberal in dousing my cereal, and took a sip of very white coffee. She cursed me — Brothers! or something — and I watched her leave, turning back to my paper when the door clicked.

Around lunch Tom popped round, cheerily bearing a bag of jersey caramels (our favourite). We shot down a few hours talking about sex and watching my sister sleep (no correlation; we were bored) before Tom trudged off home again and I headed to the smoke. After a successful journey, I returned and fixed a homely tuna casserole, the ingredients for which I had collected along the way. I caught the wrong train, though, so it was a little late in appearing. Still, hit the spot. I think a walk would have capped the night off perfectly but Harry had an early start. Ah well. Gives me a chance to catch up on those wacky Petries.

2 comments:

popcorn cynic said...

Cock-in-pants faithful? Beau must be true.

Younger sisters seem especially prone to godawful phases, and bad tempers. The cheeky reply to the milk query would have provoked a far more vitriolic response from my sister.

(Where's the footnote to match the asterisk?)

Hugh said...

"(Where's the footnote to match the asterisk?)"

Interesting question.

"Younger sisters seem especially prone to godawful phases, and bad tempers."

Hear hear. We were never like that, I say. Model offspring if ever there were.

"Oh dear."

Oh yes.