Again, I got up relatively early, before seven today, and the three of us, Urs, Didier, and I, worked through much of the day, pausing at one o’clock for a carry out lunch of bakery pizza. This has the advantage that it gives me a full-day of effective activity and hearty companionship with a minimum of movement. By 3:30, I am tired and lie down in the adjoining bedroom for a rest. In the evening, the four of us with Matti go to BiBiche for dinner to see Urs off. He leaves tomorrow and he and I both know we’ll never see one another again. I’m hoping for as little drama as possible.
So now we’ve had our dinner and parted ways. I’ll see Didier on Monday, Matti toward the end of my stay, and Urs—my cordial, loyal, kind, and honest-to-the-core friend Urs—perhaps never again. We both know it in saying goodbye. I need support for every walk to and from my apartment so Urs is resolved to give me that support now. We say a simple goodbye back in my apartment.
It’s night time. During the evening, it rains off and on. From my window, I can see how the paving stones gleam. As always, the nearby streets are full of tourists and locals looking for a good time. I help Pancake edit his thesis and now I’m off to bed. Since I’m not mobile, I have to imagine this city of countless cafes and restaurants, irregular streets and lopsided courtyards. Most of my images are borrowed from art and literature, but I also think of the fall dusk parades on the rue des Abbesses.
Saturday early morning. I sleep well and am exercising on my bed before breakfast. Saturday mid morning: we edit Pancake’s thesis, go for lunch at the Café qui parle, have coffee at a sidewalk café, and buy fruit at one of those colorful fruit stands that grace every other street in Paris. Back in the apartment, we finish editing the conclusion of his thesis. I am surprised to realize how similar our views of history are. For as long as I’ve known Pancake, I’ve been berating a proclivity for what I call “reenactment politics” in him and the members of our circle of DSA members and sympathizers. I am always accusing them of an unhistorical outlook, as if by calling themselves socialists they could somehow board a time machine and disembark in an October 1917 Petrograd. Now I can see that the passion of the historian, the passion for truth, is stronger than any sort of historical play acting.
His thesis is focused, well-documented, and convincing, good work in my opinion.
In the evening I want to see a new Norwegian satirical film called Sick of Myself. It’s about young people perpetually online and absorbed in the narcissism that this engenders. When the guy begins to achieve online fame, his girlfriend Singe is envious and eager to catch up. She envies the attention lavished on victims. When she happens to see a warning of a medication that can cause a hideous rash, she procures and takes great quantities of it until the hideous rash appears. The movie poster shows her bandaged like a mummy in a hospital gown, a cigarette in one hand and her cell phone in the other, enraptured by her success. This strikes me as the perfect satire of our sick digital society (which is perhaps a magnified version of my involuntary condition). Self-mutilation strikes me, and obviously many others, as intrinsically comical. But the film’s satirical distortion is a magnification of a simple fact: In the digital world, self-aggrandizement is ultimately the same as self-obliteration.
Unfortunately, the oldest continually operating cinema in the world, Studio 28, only a block away, does not offer Sick of Myself among its multiplex selections. Too bad. Maybe back home.
We watch a couple of episodes of Little Britain, a comedy series that could not possibly have been made or tolerated in the US. I hadn’t watched it for years but I still find its illicit black humor quite funny. Pancake wisely goes for a walk by himself and I take a shower and head for bed.
I need to find a way to get more targeted exercise. Physically, I miss my YMCA routine. I miss the gym workouts, walking the track, lap swimming, walking against the current, and finally relaxing in the sauna. I have nothing comparable here and I can feel the difference.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 