Fugato

But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door

Hér úti á götu heyrði ég rétt í þessu einhverja glaðværa unga menn syngja lagið „500 Miles“ og skyndilega fullmótaðist hugsun í höfðinu á mér sem hefur verið þar myndlaus og þokukennd frá því á táningsárum mínum þegar ég horfði á Gettu betur:

Ármann og Sverrir Jakobssynir minna mig á The Proclaimers, sér í lagi á þetta lag.

Og öfugt.

Það er ekki útlitið. Ekki eru það fræðistörfin eða tónsköpunin. Ég veit ekkert hvað það er og ég meina ekkert illt með því. En það hefur verið þannig hálfa ævi mína, og ég sé ekki fram á að það breytist.

Sumarið sem álpaðist inn í febrúarbyrjun hefur áttað sig á mistökunum og haft sig á brott í bili. Þurfti að fara í peysu utan yfir stuttermabolinn til að labba í vinnuna í dag. Peysu! Ekki nokkur sanngirni í þessu.

Þrjár túristatáningatelpur hjúfruðu sig saman fyrir utan Deli og rýndu í kort sem þær reyndu að halda kyrru í rokinu. Ég hló. Þær hlógu. „Having a good trip?“ „It’s great, thanks!“

Hvað fær þrjár vinkonur utan úr heimi til að verja fríinu sínu á Íslandi í febrúar?

Að túrista sig á hol.

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In my street there is a car alarm keeping me company through the night. It is one I haven’t heard before; sounds like somebody’s raygun set to “stun” in a seventies B-movie, except that it keeps going and going, and the tweeweeweewee sound warbles back and forth slowly in random ways to make sure it is very hard to fall asleep to (unlike a raygun set to “stun,” which puts you to sleep expertly (as does the average seventies B-movie, for that matter)).

The owner is probably already on the way home from his midtown travails, lying sideways in alcoholic stupor in a taxi with an understandably disgruntled driver who wishes he could find a new avenue in life as well as between Reykjavík and Hafnarfjörður.

Maybe the owner is the one who left that impressively bright-saturated-red puddle of vomit on my steps; probably he wanted to get it done before going home, out of consideration for the taxi driver. How do you give your barf that color? Drink Bloody-Maries all night? Get yourself a bleeding ulcer?

It just turned off. I’ll do the same.

Imagine them all completely silent.

I am at work. There is no one in here, and no sound but the faint whirr of several laptops and the clackety-clack of my keyboard.

And still it seems like there is more silence downstairs in the bank branch, where there are perhaps 60 people or so.

They are at a chess tournament. The players want to concentrate, and the spectators re-, well, -spect that.

There is probably more sound there than here. Every few seconds somebody slaps his chess clock, and a spectator whispers to another, and there is shuffling in chairs. More sound, sure. But more perceived silence as well. Silence is the absence of sound and an absence is only a thing when noticed; the more people you stuff together in a small space, the more you notice their silence, thus the more perceived silence there is.

Silence is remarkable in proportion to the number of people present. It is entirely unremarkable when there is no one there.

Dense silence. You find it in exams, sometimes in libraries, and apparently in chess tournaments.