I am excited by neatness. On trips to Ikea, I am filled with a kind of intense joy to see things compartmentalised into sweet, stylish, and Swedish boxes and bookshelves, into underbed storage units. Like Kit and Nita fighting Entropy in the Young Wizards series, it is like watching the Devil get suckerpunched. Fuck you, Mess! In your place, pants! Serves you right, Errant Towel! Etcetera, etcetera.
But those of you who intimately know me will know that I am a notoriously messy person. It is not so much that I like mess or that I am incapable of cleaning, but my mind does not exist on quite the same plane as my body. I am always elsewhere. While I may be blogging on my bed in front of my Mac now, in Garden Grove, in the slightly chilly Southern California night, I am in Nazi-occupied France with the likes of Eli Roth and Brad Pitt. I do not notice the dust on my desk, nor the dirt on my sheets in the way angels in graveyards do not mind the lichen on their faces. They are not there to care.
But I admit sometimes it gets to be maddening, and the sight of the mess in my room throws in me into a mad kind of frenzy. I feel like there are ants all over my back. A rush of blood hits me square between the shoulders, right up into my head, and I clean everything out. I wipe clean the mirrors, dust the drawers. I organise my lingerie drawer into types of lace and colour. I throw out the trash and lo, I have made my peace.
It is the same with this blog, I guess. I come here when my mind goes crazy, when I have all the languages I have learned and all the songs I have sung all crash together like a cacophonous disaster in my skull. And all the long words tumble out like sequinned gymnasts, and all the big thoughts like marching elephants bespangled and proud. All the sad sentences and the small thoughts, the ponderous loon songs of self-abasement, like tiny clown-cars tooting round the ring. And the vain ideas, the lady shimmering bare-back on the white horse, why they come around too, all naked legs in the spotlight, all bejewelled breasts.
And it gets a little bit better. It makes the maddening crowd, the lions and tigers, the bears, it makes them all right. They do not so much snarl as snicker.
I get so many bad dreams I don't know what to do. I don't want to go to sleep, mother. Five more minutes. Five more minutes.
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