A young, powerfully muscled black man with gleaming skin and a precisely trimmed fringe of beard walks past me on my way to the bar and says, “Nice beard.” My beard currently looks like someone threw a bunch of stripped electrical wire into an old hedge. Part of me wants to stop and say, “yes, my lad, let it range free, like an invasive species of poisonous weed, until it flaps in the wind like this and slaps other pedestrians in the eyes of its own accord.” The larger part of me wants to say “you sarcastic bastard” and kick his legs out. But I haven’t had any coffee yet, and my brittle bones would snap against his calves, and I still have to walk up that bloody one-in-four hill to get back to the hotel, so, dear reader, your unreliable narrator, who is almost always a scheming and prideful weakling of a middle-aged white man, let him live.

Bastard.

 

Re-reading: SCULPTING IN TIME, Tarkovsky