Actually · 9 August 2002
9ish
Wake with groan; dry mouth, disorientation, dog staring intensely at eye level. Brief inner question whether to carry dog down stairs now or pretend to be asleep long enough until Herself does it. Take dog out. Return to find Herself washing last night’s dishes. Feel guilty about not having washed last night’s dishes. Could offer to wash dishes now but don’t really want to wash dishes.
9:30–10:00
Make & consume enormous, life-threatening quantity of coffee in attempt to get lucid. Nothing to eat, really; could have cereal but nah. Could walk to boulangerie but that would take half an hour. Could drive but that would be silly: close enough to walk. Scrape mould from stale bread for toast. 2 cigarettes.
10:00–13:15
Gaze in terror at overdue projects, unanswered email, and unwritten letters before consulting new mail & referrer logs; click idly around, skim front page of 720 websites. 8 cigarettes.
13:15–13:16
Make & eat sandwich.
13:17
Close eyes ‘for a minute’.
15:00
Wake up.
15:19
Over a cigarette, consider, then decide against, shaving. Only been two days, after all.
15:30–19:00
Outside: summer in all its glory in the South of France raging away. Inside: ‘fatal error – cannot redeclare function mysql_getrow() in /index.html on line 91’. 7 cigarettes.
19:10–19:30
Venture gingerly outside. Bump into landlord, a retired school principal who intimidates the fucking shit out of you, and who wants, as ever, to engage in chitchat. Immediately forget all structure and vocabulary of the French language. Glaze over, smiling, as you try to pick a single tangible word out of the stream filling the air. Is he asking you a question? Tell him that his garden looks good, but in the process mistakenly attribute the wrong gender to the noun ‘garden’. Be corrected, sharply. No cigarettes.
19:30–20:00
Glass of wine consumed on an empty stomach causes eyes repeatedly to skip back to the first line of the same paragraph in book that isn’t that good anyway.
20:00–20:30
Light barbecue. Forget barbecue.
20:30–21:00
Coals nearly gone, add more charcoal to barbecue. Forget barbecue.
21:00–21:30
Add more charcoal to barbecue. Burn chops. Eat burnt chops & engage in conversation. Steer clear of mentioning the chops are burnt.
21:30–23:00
All flurries of activity cease; sit down to enjoy movie on Canal+, advertised in advance as ‘VM’: available in multiple languages, presumably including the original English. Film starts. Film is dubbed in French. All language channels have the voices of the same two unsubtle French actors who do all the dubbing into French. This has happened before – presumably someone forgets to push a button – sometimes the original soundtrack kicks in after a couple of minutes. Though this does not happen, sit through the whole freaking thing to see if it might. 6 cigarettes.
23:00–
None of your damn business.
* * *