Apt

Technopark, Winterthur, Switzerland

After months away, I've no excuse other than I had nothing interesting to write about.  Rather, I did, but couldn't find a voice to give to it.  I had time, but not enough; I had ideas, but not good enough. And today, as my bathroom gets stripped bare, its walls grated, its tiles replaced, I have time, but no silence.

Some things are things unto themselves: ideas or events.

The ones which are in-between, those which are woven into the mediocrity of daily life are harder to treat by 99.999999999999% of people who make an attempt. 

Graters, hammers, sanding paper, repetitive movements, a weak cloud of thin dust.  

I have heard many people say it isn't what one writes about, but how one does it.  "Style," said Céline, "comes once or twice a century, if that.  Everyone has a story, but can everyone tell it in an interesting way?"  I wonder how many writers could write about having their bathroom redone and keep the reader turning the pages.  I wonder if this can be done at all in a way that doesn't quickly become pompous and overdescriptive, that doesn't turn into a badly written caricaturish "remake" of Proust?

Because at some point, fairly early in a text about a topic such as this, one would have to go entirely into metaphorical language, or it'd turn into a manual, or a text in some DIY remodelling publication.

If I wanted to do it, the first thing I'd have to do would be to learn the vocabulary of tools and machines, of substances that end up on walls and tiles, and the different verbs to signal this or that action.  That, alone, would require more time than it'd take me to write the text itself, most likely.