passé simple

Across the street from my apartment is a bar ouvrier, always ouvert, which makes me feel less bougie without having to bouger to such vivant milieux as the poor immigrant neighborhood of Noailles. Once, as I was panting up the final hill of a long Mistral-whipped run, a burly arm stretched out from the patio to offer me a full glass of pastis...why didn't I take it? Today, thirsting for authenticity, I dropped in to ironically (?) caffeinate my nascent nihilism and entertained several auditions for the blog.

These days the blog game reminds me of the crack game, which reminds me of Flaubert's cracked cauldron and my stress-fractured foot (I ran too hard, droit au but), which stresses me out...also, as they say in France, I don't care, particularly. But, desperate to go home again, I succumbed to a soi-disant apocalyptic poet whose clichés matched my coffee and cigarette. He asked what I was writing in my carnet; "Je me considère comme bloggeuse..." Nonplussed (literally [conventionally] but not literally [à la lettre]...he could, in fact, have withstood bien plus), he waxed poetic about his own poetry, "lourde, lourde! et noire, noire comme le charbon," because "le cœur de l'homme est dur comme une pierre," and "l'homme est un loup pour l'homme"...he and he alone is on "le bon cheming." Putaing! Though he repeatedly posited that he was "positif," he was positively no positivist: "Les hommes imitent les femmes, les femmes imitent les hommes," he intoned, and this is why the world will end pretty soon ("Bombe! Bombe! Bombe!"). "Mais la sexualité est un continuum..." He just squinted one-eyed into the sun, and muttered something like "la fin du monde viendra avec un clin d'œil"...which is a metonym, I think.

Confronted with such fatalism, I donned dark glasses, lit another cigarette, cocked my head in a cute way, and couldn't help but wonder: what (besides no panties and jeans, no bra with that blouse, etc.) is really so necessary? I find simplistic fatalism makes a fat out of you, you might as well argue the essential link between l'être and la lettre, but enough...I should really stop smoking; je fume, tu fumes, nous fûmes...