communication takes a quick toilet break

what holiness is in the movie theater, this temple and peace – waiting for a film in silence, as entering a cathedral and sitting on the still perfection of a pew … the six or seven waiting humans quiet, communication unusually negligent in its relentless global responsibilities and demands.

then, two humans enter and the one’s voice is resonant, traveling easily through the space, as he talks about his life history of biological weight, bmi, diet:  he is 10 rows in front of me, 15 seats to the left, yet he is next to me, his mouth sitting in my ear … this necessary profanity … holiness, if not aestheticized in the arc of a myth … always so brief.

what keeps me from decapitating him in my mind is that his voice is rich, unpretentiously melodious, and while his topic is ostensibly banal he is so engaged – even joyed – by his chatter – his bmi is the entire planet’s naturally, calmly ecstatic and consumptive concern! – that it’s hard not to get temporarily drawn in.  though i don’t give a shit, i want to ask him questions about his experiences with vegetarianism in his 20s, about those beets he had in morocco, about the geopolitical and historic relations between flatulence and bmi.

his voice, while never loud or aggressive, occupies every seat, the ceiling in its expanse, the ubiquitous air, of this 500-seat theater.  the nine or ten of us waiting for our sacred cinematic rite to officially begin – his companion too is obliterated – for the eight or so minutes between his entry and the film’s start, inhabit his voice and become nothing but his voice and his narrative about the mass of his meat is the world.