Pink Floyd Panties

Looping thoughts and false starts

Oh hi. There you are! A reader.
I didn’t notice you at first.

I was having a self-absorbed “sad me” moment, and when I have those, I don’t really notice much else.

A lot of my life consists of repetitive sameness—the same five obsessive thoughts I’ve had since I was about sixteen. And I’m thinking: oh god, this is so boring. And immediately, because everyone knows only boring people are boring, I am so boring. But I feel like writing something.

Of course, no one wants to read about a boring person—not even other boring people. But there must be 2 or maybe 500 humans out there who recognize the very odd and unsettling and deeply uninteresting person that is me. Not always. But often.

What is remotely interesting about me curling up in a catatonic state and staring at the wall, clutching a misshapen greyish-pink IKEA pig named Wilbur? Returning shopping carts at Ralph’s? Things like that.

I think about this as I watch wilting daffodils in a pink crystal carafe. They’re still beautiful, still insisting on themselves—heads turned toward the sun like a small choir of yellow dames.

The light through the long gauzy curtains is soft. David Hamilton dreamy. The room smells like an Indian temple courtesy of Nag Champa. Everything looks slightly unreal, as though it’s already been remembered instead of lived.

The Santa Anas are blowing, and I am itchy and headachy from those stupid hot overwritten Chandler-and-Didion winds. Still, it’s perfect outside. Of course I have not yet been outside. I’m on the couch, wrapped in two blankets, wearing nothing but my old Pink Floyd panties.

Anyway.

I move to the porch with my vape. Take another “Baby Ritalin.” Two big sips of iced latte.

The day is so beautiful in a way that feels slightly accusatory, and I start going down rabbit holes—Gobi Desert landscapes, goats that make cashmere in Mongolia, fragments of information that feel like they belong to a more coherent version of me.

Teenage hashish in forest light with the cute skinny doe-eyed boys from Italy and Greece. College rave acid. The occasional weed. A little opium pipe. That night with V this past summer when we did two fat lines and fucked all night.

Oops. Apologies. I’m back here again. Trying.

I used to think I was building something by returning to the page.
Now I’m not sure I am building anything at all.

Everything I try to write becomes atmosphere instead of argument, image instead of structure, drift instead of purpose.

Still, I keep beginning. I ramble on. It’s worth trying.

A coffee a day keeps the doldrums at bay.