AFTERNOON TEA
I was going to put a kettle of water on to boil to make myself a cup of tea, but I became distracted by the shrinking ice caps and how the polar bears would soon have no place to live. I grabbed a bottle of whiskey instead and wandered out to the garden.
The sun was beautiful, its light and heat falling to the earth just so. I sat down on the grass to observe the general state of bloom and decay. Two hummingbirds wrestled, flash-throated and fierce, on a leaf the size of my palm. A handful of bees lay in a heap, crawling all over themselves, buzzing half-heartedly, dreaming of the days when there were flowers enough to keep a decent hive afloat.
I drank my whiskey, and considered ditching my cell phone. Then I considered upgrading to an internet/dsl/hi-speed telephone package. I thought about dying my hair. I wondered about dinner. I thought about skipping dinner altogether, in a gesture of bee and/or ice cap boycott and/or support. I thought about the words I hadn’t yet written, and how the sun had slunk down in the sky ever so slightly in the few minutes since I’d come out with my whiskey and my thoughts.
I thought about despair, and aging, and hormones. I thought about millions of years of fucking, not just up, but down and over. I thought specific thoughts about generalization and generalized thoughts about specific things. Mostly about water: oceans, rivers, falls that light up like fire on certain days of the year, dew, puddles, reflections, giant koi fish, unexplored depths.
There was no way I was going to finish all the whiskey before dark, nor was I going to to solve the problems of the world or my ancestors or my nonexistent descendants, so I put the cap on the bottle and went back inside, where I thought I might put a kettle of water on to boil to make myself a cup of tea.
BEVERLY HILLS GRAFFITI
