It's been a while. I've been busy. What I'm about to tell you is your choice for believing, but that's all it is, and your choice is cheap enough to me for me to go ahead and tell you anyway. So, let me tell what I've been doing since I got back.
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It started with a cup of sand. Not a metaphor or some artsy Gordian knot, but simple cup of sand. The sand in it was fairly fine - the kind you can scratch a kids hand on, but not the kind which turns to mud when pissed on. It was dry - dry enough to be used for a million malnourished similes. And, it was this cliched metaphoricity of it which seized me. Fucking strangled me for the last week and half.
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This is where I've been - back, neck, boiling brain, arched over a cup with a damp finger, counting the grains in a cup of sand.
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I'm not joking. I realise most of you won't believe it - will think this is some fantasy, with a veneer of meaning - at best a neutered pretension. That's up to you. However, what I describe next is what I've been doing - what I have physically been doing.
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I put the cup on a clean, dark blue, ironed sheet over the kitchen table. I then placed the cup in the middle, thereabouts. I licked a dab of saliva on my index finger, rubbed it on my thumb until it was as little damp as it could be without being totally dry again. I dabbed my finger into the cup. Rubbed off the few grains which stuck on my finger onto a part of the sheet. Then spread them in a circle. One by one I dabbed them again and put them in another cup. Tallied every single one in a notebook.
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I've spent nine evenings doing this. I finished last night. Forty-seven hours of transporting sand from one cup to another. I did it. I counted it. I know how many.
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I wish it was over. It's not.
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I know what I have to do next. I have to do it again. This time I have to name each grain with an appropriate name - be it by design, mood or time. I have to log all the names of each grain, make them all unique. When that is done I have to remember the order of the names by heart and recite them in my head before sleeping. I have to remember, but mustn't write down, the last one I recite each evening. Then when that is done I have to do it again, backwards. Then I have to do it all again, the counting, the naming, the memorising of the order, but this time in Russian.
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That's what I have to do - I have to fail. Please let me fail soon. It's the only way to win this one.
