Tears at bedtime


I tried to get Destroyer to go to sleep tonight, but she was unsatisfied with the replacement offered for her mother, and screamed and screamed and screamed. She lay on the floor (carefully) and then kicked her feet, still screaming, almost knocking down the old blinds, and then went to the pile of books on the bedside table and tried to put them on the floor.

I put them on the floor for her. She screamed.

I put them back on the table. She screamed.

I retreated to the corner of the room and she screamed and screamed, until my wife came in and put her to bed in five minutes (all that screaming is very tiring, evidently) which fixed things in the short term but fails to persuade Destroyer that screaming isn’t a good negotiating tactic.

I had planned to go running tonight, but all this screaming was too much emotion for me, so I lay down and read a bit of "The Ballad Of Black Tom", a rewrite of H P Lovecraft’s The Horror At Red Hook written from the perspective of a black man. As I understand it Red Hook is one of Lovecraft’s worst, most racist stories, and given the rest of his oeuvre that’s really saying something. I haven’t read it myself, so perhaps The Ballad Of Black Tom is the biggest spoiler I’ve ever read. Or I just won’t understand at all what it’s about.

Will it be squamous? Or rugose? You’ll have to wait and see.

At work today, people remarked on my new clean shaven face, which is odd as I removed my beard at the end of March. Perhaps there is some platonic, bearded ideal of me to which they are focussed, and I a mere pallid imitation. You may shake my hand and feel warmth, and the feeling that our lifestyles are fairly comparable, but I simply am not there, to misquote Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho.

And now, narcoleptic, I go to bed, hoping to run early tomorrow.


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