I think that the first time I took acid when I was littler somehow managed to depress the "insert randomness" button in my future-machine and since then there have been bouts of delirious Douglas Adams-like improbability appearing in my life.
Either that, or I just learned how to appreciate it.
Yesterday, Alain chased me out of the office long after the cleaning crew and every single other person had abandoned the building.
I plan to finish this project properly.
Marco was passing by on his way into town and stopped to sweep me up in his mp3-enabled car and we sang Beatles songs that I'd never heard before all the way to the hotel.
We argued and made fun of each other and he looked at me shyly and told me he really liked the way I'd cut my hair last week.
Way to make me feel better inside the muffled universe of my headcold.
Stepping past yet another Gramophone that I hadn't noticed before, into my hotel, the same elder english gentleman from the evening previous was having yet another difficult time with the receptionist replacing my favourite vacationing short-haired fantasy.
Impatient to get my room key and run upstairs and PEE out the eighteen gallons of lemon-tea that I'd drank over the course of the day, I quickly translated for him without thinking. It occurs to me now that I could have come across as quite rude...
But the elderly gentleman thanked me happily and told me of how he feels just a little intimidated here, he's on a trip for his company and while he usually does a lot of back-and-forth in Germany, there's some conference in town that he needed to attend.
I told him that I felt precisely the same when I was lost in Germany with all of two words in my vocabulary.
He taught me that "toilet" is "klosett".
Then he invited me out to dinner, and a "cabaret".
Dinner was at the "Boeuf Rouge" (the Red Bull, but in a classy way) and my corporate account paid for hunks of still rosy beef that tasted unlike meat has tasted in a very long time for me. We chewed not because it was rubbery, but to keep the juice circulating in our mouths, before mixing them with the Saumur Champigny that nearly glowed purple against the tablecloth.
This time I remembered to ask the waiter what was in the stuffed courgettes, it sounds easy enough to make next time I cook dinner...
The cabaret was a dance medley. A bit of ballet to Bolero, a bit of modern cabaret-style sexy-woman-with-feather-boa and line of swooning identically dressed men. Swan lake then a contortionist circus act.
Black costumes and dyed-black hair for each scene, all different, shiny and sequined or plain and cut into strange hieroglyphs along the dancers' chests, some translucent or fishnetted some so matte and opaque that the dancers all but disappeared into certain shadows, before slinking back into life from this or that formation from the fog machine.
The last montage, it was all of them, all dressed in brilliant white, dancing ring-around-the-rosy, almost as gracefully as children, reigning in an immense circle of the fog that had been their only prop and scenery.
The director walked out onto stage, shiny bald and dressed in white tibetanish pyjamas, and with great abandon cried human tears into the arms of the prima ballerina who'd danced the swan.
Leaving, on the arm of a gentleman who didn't once slide his hand onto my knee, I felt grimy in my I've-got-a-cold sweatshirt and faded corduroys, compared to the ballgowns wafting gently in the summer wind around us.
I apologized for my appearance, as if from very far away, wondering how I came to be having the conversation.
Mr. Alden looked at me and laughed and with all the frankness I've forgotten to expect from people, announced that of all the people he's met, I seem like the clever sort of girl who should know better.
"You appreciated the show in a way that those trussed-up harpies that were more occupied with their hedgerow-gossip couldn't. You paid our sensitive director a great compliment when you got so lost you forgot to sniffle. That is worth more than attempting the illusion of grandeur, when they know so little of what grandeur means."
I kissed him goodnight on a liver-spotted cheek and crawled into bed with renewed belief in the capacity for intelligence in humanity.
Finding out once again, for the thousandth time since I learned to listen, that I'm not alone in the way I think. Not alone in my twisted version of reality, nor in the little wisdom I've managed to collect along the way. Right or wrong, twisted as taffy or more clear-headed than your average bear, the label doesn't matter.
Sleep
came from a galaxy far far away, as my head reeled with a thousand things, some influenced by anti-cold goofballs, some by the sheer force of events. When I finally dropped off it was with the sort of smile that Callahan would have understood.
Whether it was the acid or spending just a little too much time alone when I was littler, somehow I am still high on the thrill of the randomness that my life has learned to generate.
Which is all a snarky way of saying that I am once again awash with wonder.