Primordial: An Abstraction

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On another, similar note:

I go to a college bar and they’re shooting pornos all over the place.

In the restrooms.

On the dance floor.

Behind the bar.

I have more or less forgotten about pornos since they are shot everywhere, all the time, in every nook and cranny of college space and life. They have become as normative a fixture as the air I breathe.

Something about this particular spectacle piques my interest. It incites obsession, in fact, and I must drink large quantities of alcohol in order to exorcize the demons from my innerspace.

Drunk, I call my wife.

I try to tell her how I feel.

I slur my words and she gets mad and hangs up on me.

I call her back and tell her I’m sorry and hang up on her.

I call her one more time and assure her that I didn’t mean to hang up on her. She didn’t deserve that.

“How are the kids?”

“The kids?”

“How are the kids?”

“They’re grown up.”

“They’re grown up?”

“They’re grown up. They’re not kids anymore.”

I wobble back and forth. “What year is it?”

She tells me what year it is.

A student waiting for her scene brushes against me and leans onto the wall. She only has on a thong and her breasts and navel have been slathered with glitter. She looks at me through two puddles of mascara.

I look at her through blurred vision.

She moans perfunctorily.

I don’t know if the moan is directed at me or if she’s merely practicing her lines. I ask her.

She calls me a name and turns with a jerk.

I try to get her attention.

She’s gone.

I remember that I’m on the phone. Nobody’s there. I can’t remember who I was talking to anyway.