Silly White Rat

Three unrelated things:

1) Have you ever heard a seagull cry, and felt that its pawk came from inside your chest, somehow? Weird feeling, that. It probably has to do with resonant frequencies, and vibrating voice-boxes, and so forth. Or maybe all seagulls are ventriloquists. Or, could be it's just an echo, and your chest is a vast empty space.

2) They're re-carpeting the halls in my building this week. Yesterday, I stepped out to get my mail, and immediately got my trouser-cuff caught on a nail. It was all nails out there, pokey nails and concrete. Today, it's spongy pink stuff, a sort of undercarpet, I presume. The neighbours' horrible welcome mat is nowhere to be seen. I'm hoping it's been stapled down and carpeted over, never to be seen again. (I expect it's been brought in, though, till the carpet men have gone. Would it be too much to ask that they forget to put it out again?)

3) Eliza says the scribbly characters on my green shirt spell out "I Love You". I learned the signs for "gold" and "spring" and "rat" and "pharmacy", but never "love". I didn't care what the shirt said, anyway. I got it second-hand, and wore it only about the house. Had I known what it said, I might have worn it more often. These shirts tend to say "silly white person", see. It just doesn't do, wearing that sort of shirt in public. (Then again, my chest is a vast, empty space, isn't it? A sounding-board for seagulls? Heartless sods like me don't belong in "I Love You" shirts. "Silly white person," on the other hand, is a reasonably accurate description.)

I found this old photograph, today. It shows an ugly tailless rat, before the ugliness set in. Ugliness in rats tends to come with age. It's not like with human beings, where you get all sorts of ugly babies running about. An ugly baby rat is a bona-fide curiosity. Even this freakish tailless monster, which later developed a ridiculous wry neck and a pair of buggety eyes, started off all right. Its name was Shakespeare.

Those are my hands in there, too, before they went all bony and horrible. People used to say I had elegant hands, with those great long spiderfingers. Who knows what they'd say now?

That reminds me--I've not been having much luck with my efforts to pack on the pounds. Eating extra food sounds simple enough on paper, but in practice, it gives me the worst heartburn imaginable, and my appetite vanishes for days. My stomach goes all that pushy way, too, shoving the rest of my organs aside to make way for its swollen self. It's terribly uncomfortable. My throat and nose are just burning, as if I'd poured hydrochloric acid down 'em (which, for all intents and purposes, is precisely what I have done). How unpleasant. I can only console myself with the thought of a dimpled smile and a curvy body. (Ha, me, with a curvy body! Can you imagine? Ah, a rat can dream! I'll be satisfied if I just get fat enough that I've got to undo my flies before taking off my trousers. A decent bum, that's all I ask.)

Which reminds me: I think it's time for dinner.