soap

I know the power of the temptation to run away from your problems! The last few months have felt a bit like my life is being run through a delay pedal and the feedback setting is turned as high as it can go and the wall of sound is towering above and the walls are moving inwards and the distortion is crushing me. I have felt it. But no matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. I know what it's like. Especially after someone left the water running and the bathtub has overflowed and the rubber duck is washed all the way out on the carpet and the neighbours in the apartment below are banging on the ceiling with a broomstick as the soap bubbles pour into their kitchen, and they're really angry because they have important guests over. Highly esteemed guests, and the wife of one of these esteemed guests is saying her Nicoise salad is ruined, and there's soap in the soup and everything's an absolute mess.

The water is rising. It's nearly as high as your knees. You clamber on to the closest piece of furniture, nursing the soaked pages of your collection of Nabokov novels, thinking up the worst methods of torture, and imagining inflicting them on the people who live below. A spectrum of colours are leaking out of your copy of Pale Fire, pooling on the kitchen table. The colours have tie-dyed the table cloth. It was a plain piece of linen anyway.

Revenge tastes like camembert. Whenever you say this to people they look at you funny. They move away from you, their faces distorting in confusion and disgust when you tell them war tastes like meat that has been fermenting in dumpsters out the back of supermarkets, and that if people can taste this, how could they possibly keep fighting? And how could politicians condemn innocent people to death, and how could journalists write in support of politicians with the taste of rotting meat in the back of their throats? Peace tastes like fruit salad. So why can't we all just eat fresh fruit salad?