Who's Afraid of Dave Eggers?
This is some sort of mental refraction, like a gelatinous ooze, gelatin—yeah, Jell-O has oozed and refrigerated over my brain, my brain now being a sort of showcase, a plastic lizard suspended in one of those rubber superballs; or bigger, more gruesome, more similar, that girl’s father’s skull preserved in an acrylic bowling ball (did you see that movie? was it a comic book first?). I’m lying in bed seeing through this Jell-O, flavorless, colorless, rubbing my eyes with my hands, thinking I should wash my hands, my hands have been all over campus today and should be washed, I’ve touched things, even myself, and collected germs of every species, I’m going to contract e. coli or Ebola or AIDS because I’m too fucking lazy to wash my hands when I walk in from touching everything in the dirty world, and then I look at the wall and I see a roach, the amorphous black haze of what could be a roach as long as I don’t have my glasses on but will probably become some old duct tape or a fire sprinkler or a shadow once I can see clearly. But I keep staring at it without my glasses on, through my Jell-O-vision, waiting for it to move and confirm that I Am Dirty, I Live In Filth. It doesn’t move. I put on my glasses. Fire sprinkler.
I give up on the nap (naps are for losers, people who fall behind, people who I don’t want to be—but oh, I’m tired, tired, why am I always so damn tired?) and I get up and sit here at this little white computer and start writing. I’m not dirty, I see through Jell-O, I’m afraid of roaches because in Florida they fly, and right between Jell-O-vision, and waiting I wash my hands with soap and tepid water and come back and continue typing. Things I should be doing: studying for the GRE, organizing my fellowship applications, choosing writing samples and reviewing them with my professor (“does this make me sound smart? how about this?”), studying for the GRE (if I do well, I’m smart, they can’t contest), trying to find a job, choosing schools and building the determination to apply to them, get accepted into their programs, excel, write, publish, teach hungry, brilliant minds in groups of twenty in classrooms with loud heaters and pipes, tour with my book(s) (poetry? theory? fiction? self-help? Roy’s Cuban Kitchen?) and sign copies of it(them) over and over again looping the leg on the R, the y, should I cross the z? did Ezra Pound cross his z? what’s the point, what could a z possibly be mistaken for, a 2? who has a 2 in their name? fuck it, I’m not crossing my z’s anymore, studying for the GRE.
The sun is so damn bright today, it’s beautiful, the light too sharp and straight to come through my window, just slices right down past my window onto sky-facing surfaces like trees, grass, cars, the water treatment plant’s churning vats; what brilliance, what warmth and optimism, the trees aren’t even swaying, just concentrating on the bath of light, absorbing all they can so they’ll be beautiful too, and it’s too hot, way too hot, walked here fast, sweating, to get out of the heat, who can walk around in this? people kayak in this, hike, throw balls around? are you serious? This is too hot. I can’t stand it. If it were to start raining right now, like it has every afternoon since April or May, I would be glad. Like yesterday, everything was so damn hot the rain boiled right on the concrete into huge, eerie amounts of steam, the sun still bright and the rain coming down in torrents, a canvas of rain, and the steam billowing back up, probably the rain for the next day (is that how condensation/precipitation works? is that on the GRE?). That’s what happens when it’s fucked-up hot outside, something up there, or someone, God maybe (whatever), says, “It’s fucking hot,” and just lets it rip, no time for clouds! no time for wind! no time for a warning-shower! ZIP! and the rain pounds and cools everyone the fuck off with the sun still up there buzzing. This is summer in Florida. This is summer outside my window. This is naptime.
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