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The Gum Thief


I dream of going to Europe one day. What exactly is it about Europe? People go there and suddenly all of their problems are solved, and as a bonus they're suddenly sophisticated and glam when they come back.

... in the swan-filled, ambiance-rich town of Stratford-upon-Avon in England. Everywhere I looked - culture! Culture! Culture!

I sometimes get the feeling that we're having full-time one-on-one unprotected sex with the twenty-first century, exchanging fluids with the era: antibiotics, swimming pool chlorine, long-chain molecules, gas fumes, new car smell - all of it one great big condom-free involuntary love-in.

Here's something: I've noticed that when you get older, you not only have a To-Do list but you could start making a Things-I-Used-To-Do list, too. <...> It's strange how things leave you one by one, isn't it? Old friends. Enthusiasms. Energy.

All they eat in this country [England] is sandwiches - the kind you got in your lunch box in school, cut diagonally and sold in sets of two inside vacuum-packed containers at corner stores and train stations. I bet even the car dealerships and kidney dialysis centres here sell them.

And how can somebody be rich in a place where everything is so insanely expensive?

The hostel is really wearing on me. I think I'm one-point-six years too old to really care about the stuff most of the hostellers care about (cheap beer; cheap tickets; an even cheaper hostel), and even something simple like doing laundry takes roughly the same amount of time, energy and money as buying and assembling a large IKEA bookshelf. And then I walk around the city [London] and see the amazing houses people live in, and I look at my own life and I feel like a hamster.

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning.
Imagine seeing the grocery store's checkout girl grow horns.
Imagine growing younger instead of older.
Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

... your dog would love England - dogs all over the place, and they're darned sophisticated dogs too. Honestly, to see some of them, you'd think they read Elle Decoration magazine and do yoga.

At the end of the day, I'll scroll through the day's photos with him, and even on the camera's dinky little screen the whole day comes back to me, which is unsurprising, but what is surprising are the background details I remember that I might never have remembered otherwise: an Evian truck blowing blue smoke; a woman walking three wiener dogs; a cloud shaped like a muffin. So imagine if you could scroll backwards and look at your whole life the same way. God only knows how many trillions of memories are stored inside us - memories we'll never retrieve simply because we don't have a device that allows us to browse them properly.

I was leaving my hotel, feeling spaced out and depressed by the Christmas decorations here - not only because they're Christmas decorations and hence automatically depressing, but because they're so much more beautiful and delicate and, I don't know... devoted than the cardboard schlock we put up in Staples windows. And I felt stupid and young and not worthy of all the beauty these Frenchies soak in every day. It's killing me, all this beauty. I have this feeling the French have X-ray vision and look at me and know that I live with my mother in a Kleenex box on the other side of the planet, that I can't cook, that I watch too much TV and, when I do, it's never the History Channel.

My relationship with the mirror is usually like locking eyes with a stranger on a bus and then looking away. But this time I didn't look away, and there was foolish, naive, pink, blubbery, boring, nothing little me. If I saw me on a bus I'd snicker and say, "Well. At least I'm not her." But I am.

... and she had the God-given absence of any ability to analyze the effect she had on people.

"So tell me, how is life different with makeup covering your face all the time?" - "I think I'm over makeup now. It protected me for a while, but it's like a magic spell. Once you lose faith in it, it's merely more junk in life."

Brittany thought of Steve and she thought of Gloria. She remembered the way Gloria had been massaging her spleen all night. Dear God - Gloria has spleen cancer. The diagnosis came to her like that.
She thought some more about Gloria. Gloria has Alzheimer's. That's why she can't remember her lines.
And then Brittany thought about herself, and suddenly it came to her: I'm no longer a child. It happened to me when I wasn't looking.