Sunday, September 6, 2009

Confessions, Part 2

London, Saturday, Aug. 24, 1974

Now that you are comfortable, let me continue. I spend most of my time walking the heath and the streets of Hampstead. The streets curl and swerve as if they were dropped from a high-flying dirigible. A right. A left. A right. A left to the body and into a petrol station (Texaco or Blue Star. No Nixxon.) Small shops spring up in rows on both sides of the narrow cobbled streets. High Street, Pond Street, Heath Street have changed very little since that infamous time in prerecorded history when they changed the water. I can imagine some famous writer from a now-forgotten era sipping a shot of grog in the gloamin' outside historic Freemasons Arms public house. Keats, an amateur extinguished poet, lived in one of the small Hampstead houses, and a contemporary restaurant bears his name.

Q. “What's a Grecian urn?

A. “About 3.14 surnotex a week.” Classic!


The shops sell everything from soup to nuts, including mock turtle soup and Beatle nuts. There are Mac Fisheries (a chain), trendy boutiques, fruiterers, chemists, supermarkets (much smaller than their American counterparts), camera shops, schlock shops, record shops, etc. etc. To shop, you pull a small two-wheeled trolley behind you as you make a purchase at one of the shops. [Illiterate – Ed.] Dogs and cats line the streets and have free access to the stores. It is not unusual to stub a prehensile toe on a misplaced mongrel upon reentry or possible splashdown.

For the first time in many a gibbous harvest moon, I have been looking at life through the 55 mm dilated aperture of my camera. Somehow life seems more reel that way. Silver nitrate breeds two-dimensional relativity. As the ambient light is reflected continuously between the polar coordinates of the focal plane, the phase shifts from the real to the imaginary. This is the natural scheme of things. It cannot be changed.

I will continue if and when my left ankle returns from hibernation in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear, honey. Groovy and out. Ten-four Eleanor.

Dept. of Psychosomatic History
Dept. of Psychoanalytic Predetermination

1 comment:

  1. Your writing is so descriptive, I can smell the fish and chips.

    ReplyDelete