We are not on tour.
What do I wish?
I had been home longer than three and a half minutes when I received a text message. Mr Douglas, do not forget your 10am dentist appointment tomorrow…
This was not the text I was expecting. My manager was due to get back to me about what days I would be working this month. She’d reeled off a few dates last time I was in, but I work there so seldom I hardly listened. As far as I knew, I was due behind a desk for a day or two in the distant future. I had asked her to text me back to remind me of exact dates. I thought she had a good week or so to get back to me.
The message from the dentist didn’t half make pretty shapes; entirely abstract by this point in the evening. It said something about the morning—something a long way away. Further application of whisky will sterilise any wounds for now (I figured), a morning panic-scrub will make all those tidy gnashers gleam like greek arches, and a quick goodnight kiss will improve my mood such that any overnight healing will be hastened by deeper sleep and a flood of health-enhancing chemicals.
Needless to say, on day one of the band’s return, my affairs were not all in order. The internal bliss and renewed intellectual peace following our experience outstripped the unwarranted self-importance of any ‘appointment’ or ‘supplemental employment’.
Later, as my weak and heavy eyes fell closed, my phone buzzed.
It was a text.
You know you’re in tomorrow?
-
We are not on tour.
What do I wish?
I woke up too early to a dark morning and shnarfed down an unhealthy breakfast from a plate nobody had washed. When it came time to leave, my face was too-dry-soapy clean (I could feel my skin crack when I smiled), I had my neat shoes on (with holes in), and my stomach had decided to take me on a 17th century sea voyage. The woman who lives in the same place as me (is she sadist? Masochist? I can’t tell which, but it must be one), who had left the house about twenty minutes before, WhatsApp’d me to say the bus stop at the end of the road would be out of service for the next hour or two, and I’d have to walk the extra distance to the next one that was working.
It’s very cold. She said.
I put one foot out of the door and a sheet of rain fell from the sky.
-
We are not on tour.
What do I wish?
I arrived annoyingly early at the dentist’s, as I’d rushed through the rain straight onto a bus. The run was long and lurching (thanks to the sudden onset of nausea), and the bus was packed and hot and misty, so I’d sweated through my work shirt which I’d have to stay in all day.
The receptionist looked at me over her glasses and offered me a seat.
I had a long time to go until my appointment and the other person waiting was coughing through stories of grim infections she’d had. She laughed, and was good natured, but I tried hard to bury myself in internet ego death. It was no good—my stomach was churning and rolling and I held it with one hand and winced. One of the receptionists (one of them: an old person made young through that parasitical age-transfer that can happen when a lump in time so desires to steal what is not its own, the other: blending so well in to her surroundings I thought there was a strong wind moving papers about) had decided to put The Worst of Smooth Elevator Jazz on the reception stereo. The cackles of the infected woman played along to it. Since the last time I had been here, all the interesting decorations had been taken down. There was, however, a rack selling herbs in metal buckets. The walls and the surfaces and the chairs were gleaming white. Of course they were. The combination of internal biology and external ambience gave birth to the fatal combination of not only needing to fire lunch from the front, but actively wanting to.
I blindly sweated a few cog twirls down the plughole and my name was called. I followed the hygienist down the hallway into the white surgery without looking at her. I smiled at the floor and braced my abdominals. My belly had a knife in it.
‘Feel free to put your things down there and make yourself comfortable on the chair.’
So I got on the chair, and the motors ran and slowly and, like a great cannon shifting its aim, my open mouth was now directed straight at her face.
She smiled.
My stomach lurched and I rolled my eyes.
‘Is there anything in your mouth that’s bothering you?’
‘Not yet,’ I thought.
And another wave of nausea ran from the bottom of my stomach through my chest and into my face, throwing my consciousness off. Something would have to give.
‘Not really,’ I said.
She looked at me. A moment passed. She smiled a soft, motherly smile before donning a face mask and a pair of protective goggles.
-
We are not on tour.
What do I wish?
What is enlightenment?
Is it a state of bliss, or a state of ignorance? Or a state of bliss in ignorance? Or is it knowledge of the bliss of ignorance and the acceptance of bliss as bliss? Enlightenment is nothing more than enlightenment. Is that what it is?
What is the opposite of enlightenment? What of the heaviness of a thought? Is enlightenment the freeing of the mind from the weightiness of thought—a state where you are able to see the valuation of thought as an illusion? What is the value of that illusion?
Of what value is consciousness?
Thus, a quiet day at work passes. Another drop in the bucket. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Fluorescent lights kill.
Nausea passes.
Teeth get cleaned.
As I walked home past the gyms with large windows, I watched the women on the treadmills with their bouncing ponytails. I stood still and watched them run and we both failed to change in size or shape.
I wish we were on tour.
Tim
