surface-truths

I now have two diaries, enough to run two lives.

I work my job and then I also write. I must do both to survive.

Akemi often talked about survival, but she was alone, so I don’t know how she managed. I have a husband and a dog, yet still sometimes reality slips away.

The other day I broke my toilet. I smashed the flush so hard against the cistern that something came undone and the water would not stop flowing into the bowl.

That day I wanted to read three articles on performance theory and a recently published book on warrior women in the archaeological record of the Scythian steppes (around modern-day Georgia).

Hallelujah! I managed to achieve these things reading on the floor, splayed out, surrounded by roughly stapled papers, highlighter pens and open books with cracked spines – all to the tranquil sound of my broken flush. It was like a tiny waterfall keeping my spirit cleansed and my mind cool.

And yet, I knew that as much as I liked the sound of the calming water flowing through my toilet it was also broken and when it stopped being a bank holiday, I would have to actually fix it. Call that plumber with the labrador energy again, to fix the toilet, again.

Two days later I woke up at 6AM. Determined. I headed into the bathroom, searched for a YouTube video and started rummaging in the toilet. My tiny hands were deft at unscrewing the flush valve. I didn’t understand how the levers worked, so I had to keep pulling the contraption in and out of the hole in the wall where my cistern is hidden (more like a cave system than a cistern) to understand how they fit together.

I fucking fixed the toilet! It took me over an hour, but it was still before work started, and I had saved on that plumbing fee! I was jubilant.

Then I went to scratch ROLO behind the ears and found that she was infested with harvest mites. I screamed.

Dejected after my toilet win and my mites defeat I received some wisdom from my documentarian friend Annina. She told me that the practical challenges in life can often be the most grounding (rather than being stuck inside my head all day; guilty) and she quoted to me some Joseph Conrad from the Heart of Darkness.

The protagonist is navigating a steamboat down the treacherous River Congo, and he must give his full attention to the mundane details of the workings of the boat.

‘There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man.’

And these surface-truths are things that stop you from losing your mind with anxiety and fear and the rabid imagination taking over. So, bless the surface-truths for keeping our wits about us and not losing control of the vehicle.

Tomorrow, I shall drive ROLO to the vets.