Kafkaesque July

Selma Othmani
Scuzzbucket
Published in
4 min readJul 27, 2024

Nota Bene

1. I have no idea what I'm about to fucking write.

2. I don't know about this movie below. I just liked the woman's haircut.

3. Here’s what I’m misering on now. For an authentic reading experience you may play it too. Not like I’m eager not to feel like the only Kafkaesque around or something.

https://youtu.be/gPjqWwkAymg?si=YMlad_O11d1DPBgr

4. The song is a forever-tribute to my dearest fella Fatnesi.

5. Would you be kind and highlight my syntactic errors for me? My head isn't level. Thanks.

6. I never thanked you properly before for letting my odd stories show up on your Bucket, Franco Amati. You owe me many professional recognitions. Here I thank you beforehand, beyond my retarded manners.

PORTRAIT OF A LAZY WOMAN
(Chantal Akerman, 1986)

The people from the balcony underneath mine are having a private party thing.
A fine crack smell is ascending graciously blending up with this Bahamas song.

10 P.M.

What was I fucking thinking..

Overnight chia and salads would make it go away or something?

An aloe vera-potato-something mask — as recommended the woman from grandma’s funeral?

Keeping cigarettes median in couplets per day?

What was I thinking?

Indulging into some crappy nihilistic hedonism? Seriously now? Amor Fati? On what budget? More rhetoric questions now?

I relapsed I guess.

I am trounced. I never said my life is together.

I lean forward from my psychobubble, a.k.a cloud 9.

Watch mobiles come and go.

God am I injured within. Quashed. Dust-shrouded.

Jeer me up it is!

Now I skim those Gregor Samsas at the café down the building, with their hookahs and their girlfriends following UEFA Euro.

Up ahead there are those distant wedding fireworks. Green and red.

There she goes, the lady who feeds the street’s dogs everynight, followed by her many cats. She is talking to AlBaba, the café’s manager.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

It doesn't like ..

For strangers to be more familiar in time than they know.

For you to become familiar with their cars. Their pets. Their horaires.
Improvise their names. Guess their stories.

AlBaba. Téranga the cat. The bavette fucker. The girl from the beauty center who has an artificial butt. The banker’s jeep track. Todd the sloth from 8th floor. Our nextdoor neighbor and his obsession with the “planet of Japan.”

They stiffen up lacunas in your solitary wait. They add the glitch, the noise, the ordinariness, the amity: Stage directions for the sub-plots of your own tale of lovesickness.

Sometimes it feels sad up here, as in fuck my life!

Other times I just sniff bits of herbs, as in other people’s dinner scraps; and be like ha, sensational! But still fuck my life.

Fuck it as in, when it’s mine alone.

A life minus love is anything but a life.

So what I be not theoretic tomorrow. Or chronically ill. Or unthankful.

Or a hopeless case am I?

Why would you think little of me just because I think little of myself?

[This is the part where I cry hard that I hyperventilate.]

I wish I have the stomach for things I don't have the stomach for.

I wish the words write themselves by themselves.

Because what an unhappiness to pen.

What a furnace of bereavement.

To have no .. Pulse.

Not an iota to wrestle with this tyranny.

Fuck the rabbit. Or holy fucking rabbit. Is that it Jack? Fucking rabbit something ..?

Sickish July.

I think of what to cook for dinner.

Or no need.

I think of anything to watch after I overdosed from youtube shorts.

(Cyberpunk) minus (reflecting on Pollock's Automation.)

Sounds very very unlike me.

Maybe I’ll stick with Andi Ma Nkollek. (Retarded version of Y’a Que La Vérité qui Compte)

Not getting booze meanwhile, which, okay fine.

Not caffeinated enough to engage in academia. Or mitigate my stream of critical ideas.

I’d rather be writing to you on what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe did out there. That’s of substance.

No stomach for pedagogy.

Or for feverish lecturing. Patrice Lumumba and Sankara.

Or Roberto Bolaño my infrarealist love.

Or René Guénon's style of sufism.

My lectures on the world now?

Finito burrito.

Some fucking Labrynth of fucking mysticism and occultism. (Not flexing with ism-words. A friend of mine taught me these two when describing his intellectual hibernation after he fell in love with a girl he couldn’t forget for seven fucking years after they broke up — Good times buddy!)

What an infinite summer.

Plus, mosquit(h)oes.

I am losing my head to all those juvenile laughters from the party below. Knowing only one single voice tone would make my heart flourish at the moment, and laugh July away but ..

You know what they say,

Like..

You know what they say.

I’m recalling the mosquito that Linda saw on Pixabay the other time. Longest legs and teal texture, having sex on my skin like she never had around the garbage can before.

The moon non-present like a coward.

AlBaba.

Mobiles.

Fuck .. It's

Fuck.

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