Late

It's hardly late by Tel-Avivian terms, only 0:22 at night, yet I feel late.

I spent much of the evening in a radio studio with my friend Susanna, we spoke about Arto Paasilinna's "Year of the Rabbit". It is a book about giving up. A man runs over a rabbit in a Finnish forest, walks among the trees and finds it. Tends to its wound and then drifts with it. He forsakes his Helsinki existance in favor of a drifter's lifestyle, working at odd jobs in the forests of Savo, Kainuu and Lapland, hunting a bear in the snow and drinking its blood, sleeping by a campfire at night.

At no point does Paasilinna describe what this man's feet smell like.

This week I watched a film about escaping: "Into the Wild", by Sean Penn, after the book by john Krakauer. Again a man heads into forests. This time he is young. He is disillusioned not with a family he had built but with the family that brought him life, a truly disfunctional one. He heads north- to alaska, secludes himself in the wilderness, than (spoiler warning), after several weeks of lonely partial bliss, he dies, having accidentally eaten a poisenous plant. Alexander Supertramp escaped completely, too completely.

He is described as having worn no socks for two years.

My feet smell fine but I know I'm escaping too, that I have been since I was 18. Sometimes it's just so damn dark, this whole story. Sometimes it's bright skies by the road in switzerland, examining my sorry shoes, having just crossed Lichtenstein on foot. Sometimes it's late at the little prince, Playing me, playing friend, playing lover, playing father of sorts. buying Flashky a beer because he knew who built the Seagram building.

Whoever built the seagram building wasn't escaping, not when he did it. He did beforehand, you must do for a while, but you don't build the Seagram building from a dead bus in Denali National Park, nor from a dismal Lappish landscape: a slashed forest on the swamps' edge, a screaming crow on a dead tree. you don't build the Seagram building from the back of the Little Prince nor from a studio of Israel's Government radio. I'm going to learn how to do it.