Notes from a Room

The young women in those tight denim shorts that are fashionable now, in their skirts, in their summer dresses. They own me, they make me small. Look at me, they say, look at me and… go on home.

– Frenet, Journal

Sleepy pubs in the afternoon. Soft drafts, light through the leaves, through the windows. Heat. I seep out of myself, float in the air.

I sit with the jobless and old-timers. Workers in splattered overalls filter in. Soon the suits will arrive and it’ll be time to leave.

But there comes a point, after a few pubs, when I can gather myself in and sit still, where I am, in my own skin.

And then I can sit for what seems like hours, in the slanting light, hardly moving, hardly thinking, half-listening to the muffled chatter in the background.

– Frenet, Journal

The old man whose acquaintance I once made in a pub, I who never talk to strangers, who am never spoken to. His lips moved as he sat on his own, a type I always ignore. The old man who became my drinking acquaintance during my heavy drinking days, in the days when I knew no one, spoke to no one, simply by virtue of us sitting in our customary seats some distance apart in the empty afternoons, who muttered soft banal words that I barely heard, and barely responded to, who was neither happy nor unhappy but just sat there day in day out, living out his time – a condition I aspired to in those days, which are not so far away, which in fact are always close behind me.

– Frenet, Journal

The concept of dignity has long since lost all meaning for me. I’m a desperate man. I live for the days of calm, between the black waves, when I can read and my soul expands.

– Frenet, Journal

Why this journal in the first place? I delete as I type, meanings disappear as the words appear on the screen.

A fat black fly buzzes back and forth between me and the computer. I wave it away and it returns. A perfect start.

– Frenet, Journal

Time to confess, I tell myself as I sit down at the computer. Time to tell the whole truth at last. But about what? The lack of truths to confess?

– Frenet, Journal