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The man in black
I've got a start date for my cleaning job at the hospital: 3rd March. Not really what I want to do, but neither is servicing a credit card. Both are slavery. "Work is a prison of measured time," as Raoul Vaneigem put it. But on the bright side, I can cram all my week's hours into three days of twelve hours each.
There's a good pub about half an hour's walk from Mel's flat. It's along a car-dominated road, with the infernal grey noise of tyres on wet tarmac, and it's winter, so we don't often go there, but the other day she proposed a walk there "just for one or two" before we came back for our tea.
After "one or two", we were asked to move, as the DJ was setting up where we were sitting. "Well, we could just see what he's like I suppose," one of us said. We got chatting -- or were talked at, rather -- by this disabled woman on crutches who had been invalided out of the army who took delight in showing us her grotesquely malformed knee, and the foot pointing the wrong way.
A couple of hours later I was dancing under the 70s disco ball and those big bulbs of coloured mobile disco lights, which have a lovely catalytic relationship with alcohol in the brain. A woman was dancing near me in an absolutely enormous jumper. With no preamble whatsoever, she put it over me while she was in it, and we started dancing with our two heads sticking out of the neck hole, our bodies in a pleasant abutment underneath.
You may remember that I said that a friend of the family was playing about with a new phone one day, whilst laying on the bed, facing the mirror, in a room which a child had always reported as having a bad feeling to it.
She accidentally pressed "burst" instead of the normal take a photo button, and in a single frame, out of scores of them, there was this figure looming over the bed in which the child felt so uncomfortable.
2 comments
Thank You for remembering the photograph !
Of course one can say “electronic artefact” - but I am at a loss when it comes to (digital) technicalities.
Your picture had me thinking a bit about my wishy-washy stance towards the Otherworld, it bubbles on in cerebro.
Three 12 hour shifts - ambitious, I could not do this. My solution would be four days a 9 hours, three days off, or a free Wednesday.
But heck - it’s Your schedule. I just can’t do 12 hour shifts any more, would kill me within a year.
I can’t explain that photograph; it’s too complicated a shadow for it to be some sort of flicker.
I’m a bit concerned about the twelve hours shifts as well. And I’ll have to get up at 5am. I suppose one day off will be just to recover.
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