Genesis

One blustery December afternoon in 2006 I was walking back to my apartment in Paris. The last leg of that walk, no matter where I had been coming from, almost always involved walking along Avenue Rapp. When that was the case it always included my passing of two guys living on a quilt on the sidewalk and back into an alcove of the Post on Avenue Rapp. I had been seeing them there for two years. They were always there. I always saw them. But on this day something different, something additional happened. What was different was that when I got back to the apartment I got out my constant companion, my yellow tablet of lined paper, and started writing. "We were no different, those two and I …"

Were these, I wondered, the seminal words for the book that I had always believed I would someday write? If they were so to be, they remained as the solitary seminal start for the balance of that visit to Paris. But they remained. They existed. The tablet returned with me to Seattle and all of its pages, those written on and those blank remained attached. I used those tablets in the same way that others use spirals. So they weren't gone. But they weren't growing.

Then in January of 2007 I revisited those words. I re-read them; I savored them; I pondered them. Then I worked and expanded them into a little tableau.

That little tableau became significant: it did constitute a spark for what became Screen Saver; they weren't seminal, as in being the beginning, but they were motive. I am including them in today's post, because they became what ultimately turned out to be chapter nine, and then later on toward the finish line, chapter ten of Screen Saver.

"They are two guys living in an alcove doorway of a post office on Avenue Rapp. They talk to passers by, sometimes with significant animation on both sides of the discussion, and with apparent respect on many occasions from their passers by guests. They drink quantities of an amber colored liquid purveyed in large, probably litre plastic bottles. One would assume the liquid to be alcoholic in nature, helpful in creating the numbness necessary to live in a doorway, in the cold of a Parisian December, and with little or nothing to do except the occasional talk with passersby. Their meals appear sporadically and mysteriously, apparently supplied by some of the passersby. The meals are usually good looking sandwiches (hard to get a bad one in Paris) or bread or pasta. Always they carefully monitor a shallow, small cardboard box lid on the sidewalk in front of them. Over time coins appear – centimes and infrequent euros – and these constitute the gross daily financial input to this tiny island of near-the-edge human civilization."