Cleanliness...more from the middle

I hear people say they come unstuck in time, all the time. It's hard to think that sentence, let alone say it. Thank god this is all in my head. I know, it comes from that book. But as I lean, too heavily, perhaps, on the sink, and watch the water escape the faucet, covering my hands, catching the grain of my skin, turning to rivulets instead of rivers, and droplets instead of streams, I think I know what they mean. It's trite, and I'll not say that I have indeed come unstuck. That would be ridiculous.

...

I've come unstuck in time.


Serious. I wish I still smoked. Turning off the faucet and navigating the wreck that is our office restroom to find a suitable towel turns out to be a Herculean task. I opt instead for "drying" my hands in my just-this-side-of-too-long hair. Remember that country song, "I Don't Go Around Mirrors"? Charlie Pride? George Jones? Couldn't be Jones, but Pride...maybe. I couldn't even hum the tune at the moment, so I'm not really sure why it occurs to me that it should sound like Charlie Pride, but it does. I ascribe some sort of sweetness, some cleanliness, to him. So slick, so cool. And no, not because he's black. Because he had that calm delivery. Sam Cooke wasn't like that, right? Nope, even in the Soul Stirrer days, he brought the sex. Pride? I don't see it. Maybe I'm wrong. It's happened before; that one time.

It's the cleanliness that brings me back to Marvin. I've started washing my hands...a lot. It's a little odd, actually. Not like I'm headed for OCD-land or anything, but, it's also not that I'm THAT dirty. Marvin, however, is. And it's clear, if one reads in the way that the folks at my old institution trained us to read, that it means something that he's so dirty. Personally, I think that's bullshit. He's a damn mortician. He embalms dead bodies. And that's only after picking them up at the hospital, carting them back to his workplace, and laying them out on the table. It's a dirty job and I just don't see the meaning in overthinking everything about it.

I, on the other hand, am fairly clean. Unless you count the dirt in between the keyboard keys, and the layer of dust gracing the top of my computer monitor. Or the coffee pot. Gross. But I don't count those. They don't even compare to Marvin's work, even though we're both in an industry where we're paid to make people look good. The more I think about it, the more I think I'd rather be in his soft-soled patent leather oxfords, staring a dead body in the face, rather than dead prose. No one thinks Marvin can resurrect that body. He can only make it presentable. Here, they expect Jesus to rise with every stroke of my pen.

The faucet's dripping, and I'm leaving it that way.