The Extinction of Choice – A Dinner Party
(Illustration of the addictive state of confusion in the dinner party aftermath.... a curious feeling with a name put to it)
Eating a cool dollop I'm easy, but “porridge can be cooked just one way more,” says the gas in the shop, ringing triumphant in thick bottle glass. The shop I dislike I go in the most. Then circling and visiting the grand pianos of friends in their apartments, locks spin newer than the new walls, worn handles drop, some worried eyes drain open. Plastic bags with moisture lining transport our table weight... At midnight dinners with hair sellers, shiny tousled people, jam-makers, skinny wrists, and ex-traffic wardens; we sit on typewriter cases, bellow quietly, and drip along the rectal freeze. Selecting the minutes like friends the damp clock counts the world in the kitchen. Further in, anonymous girder metal shelves contain our next decade's ideas, and a silly book about rubber telephone moulds.
It's a dinner party. Unflagging liquids parade through those dining seats of all of us – the liquor of abandon and yellow suspicion; abacus juice, time wine, pre-congealed; and we, all five abacuses here, gladly assassinate our hours and leave to nine-finger music that carries like a sewer bus. The door flushes, they leave to check email tins, while I stack light bottles in the bathroom and miss the painted stink in silence. All those choices and I don't know a thing to make of them... ambivalent as if I've stood still or been thrown ahead. Some moments rip slowly through the holes where my buttons used to fit, as the fragment glow in the door's gold glass rectangle fades out. Solitude for a while, with the chalky tiles and hot cistern, and it settles. A key on the obscured piano has been stuck down, on the instrument they left me as a gift until next time. The roller coaster of home stops abruptly in the style of an attack of morality. The crane waits motionless outside the window, like an ankle. Swarming in me is the porridge of entertainment – the temporary state of the extinction of choice. I want more, and I want it to pass.
