Something French

Lately I have been too much surrounded by things French; French women, French literature, French thinkers and poets, bars named after famous French places. I've even been eating French foods and drinking French wines. Somewhere in my throat I fear an accent may be hatching free from the cocoon where it hides, deep in the caverns of my tonsils, hanging upside down like a bat from my epiglottis, spreading its flowery wings and tickling my tongue, curling it up at the back of my mouth, creating something distinctly French.

Still, despite this sudden and unintentional immersion in French culture, I find myself craving more. The poetry of Verlaine and Baudelaire beckon me, though I know nothing about them. They are names that spring up again and again. Just now I even considered resurrecting my dear friend Proust, whom I'd left so long ago, in the middle of Swann's Way. Earlier today I finished Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers. A lovely book he wrote about relishing the scent of his dirty prison farts. In between masturbating beneath lice-ridden bed sheets and cupping the scent of fetid flatulence to his nose, Genet regales us with graphic tales of homoerotic love and lust. It's fun for the whole family, really. He achieves something that is both incredibly unique and repulsively intimate. There's nothing I can say about it that Sartre hasn't already said, and better.

I just ate a bag of cookies. I wonder if they are from France. Nope, they are American. Perhaps I will learn French and write a sordid little tale about eating cookies and farting. Of course an arrest will have to be made, so that I can write it from a dreadfully dull and unforgiving prison cell, but that is no matter. I will call it Monstre de Biscuit. It's already deliciously euphemistic, serving as a double entendre without any additional effort on my part. Even the phrase double entendre is French! Can you see my predicament dear readers? My fate is sealed.

My French interest, she is back in France for the time being. She will return soon enough though and we will embark on a wild journey, the kind you might read about in a dirty French novel. We will ride gallantly into the glowing orange horizon, in pursuit of the setting sun, until we are greeted by fast falling liquid twilight. There, under the dark azure of swirling night, which gives birth to dim and distant stars, we will approach a remote yet tastefully adorned dwelling, to perfume fine sheets with the fragrant sweated scent of our love. Burning passion will line the sky in luminous streaks, screaming overheard, across an invisible atmosphere full of cold comets arcing, leaping over the earth like skipping stones. Our pleasure will be dizzying and deep. Celestial secrets will be told to us by the thin, pale circle of a solar eclipse, which, whispering in hushed tones of soft light, will illuminate a yellow disc, a sun for our hearts to move around in smooth circles. The gentle warmth humming all around us will seem to us the glimmering wings of numerous, imperceptibly small, yellow hummingbirds. The four walls where we roll ourselves into and over one another will be as thick, as gaseous, and as vast as great budding nebulas, smelling of farts and sex and semen and musk; of sweet, smitten, loamy humanity. Oui.

Oui.

Sounds like wee wee. Which is slang for penis. What would I name my penis? Something French. Something small.

Napoleon!