Warm Recollection #3

More from the Bitz files

As introduced here, these Warm Recollection posts are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…

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If you’ve slept, and you deal with someone who’s been awake since yesterday, you are in a genuine sense encountering someone from a different time period. They’re still in back then. You’re in now. It’s the cheapest form of time-traveling.

Sleep does other things. If you simply have sex with someone, that’s a situation. Quite one-dimensional. If you both fall asleep and wake up together, however, even without having sex… that’s different. You’ve entered a new style of relationship whether you meant to or not. It’s like cats crashing out asleep on your lap: an implicit demonstration of trust that bonds you on a non-verbal level.

I’ve no idea what goes on while we’re asleep, but it’s important.

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If someone departs your life through dying then you miss them, but it’s clean. It’s horrific, but (at least in trivial ways) over. They become a ghost. If someone disappears from your life without dying, you miss them too… but you become the ghost. They’re still alive, still real. But through being lost in missing them, you are not.

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Only well-dressed middle-aged French men can carry a gut successfully. Many of them choose not to — and I assume it must be a choice, because I can’t see them deigning to diet — but if they have one, it’s carried as if it is of no consequence.

Italian men look bullish about being overweight, unrepentant. Americans carry it, or not, as a factor of the class system they deny they have. English men just look fucked-up and fat. French men — at least in Paris — seem so unaware that a gut might even be an issue that after a while you start wishing you had one too.

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I assumed by my age that for guests I’d be studiously selecting artisanal cheeses and hand-pickling baby vegetables, not trying to artfully re-arrange half-eaten Costco variety packs and wondering if those gherkins in the fridge are still okay.

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Another person’s washing up always seems more romantic, their clutter more intriguing, the contents of their fridge more desirable, than your own. It’s not.

And neither, most likely, is their spouse.

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