How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness. This is absolutely true.

When I set this rickety connection and finally got the obscure ABC feed stable enough to run, the image of the red carpet filled my screen. And Tilda Swinton was there: no one interviewed her. She was just in the background, unnoticed, and in her black dress with the one sleeve she seemed like a statue of something alien and wonderful – a wonderfulness too strong for ABC. And then again, sitting behind some actress as they were giving the awards: her hair the exact shade of rust and cut in short, angular strokes, and her eyes: she was too pretty for this tacky room with its tacky women, too good for Hollywood and strange here. You wanted her back in the far northen Scotland or in a movie, not idling with these idlers. You wanted her to be Galadriel, because when she’d say that she will not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the night and day, you’d believe her. And you just knew they nominated her for Best Supporting Actress because they needed another face on that screen when they give it to someone so much tackier than her. And when she won, we were as surprised, her and me.

And when she gave the speech she was sexy and commanding in a way women aren’t in this world. She was unphazed about this Disney Princess dream. Which made her all the more worthy.

Tilda, Tilda, be mine. Or better let me be yours. Israel’s not Scotland but we have beaches and in the winter they are sometimes gray and stormy; we could walk them like bullets through a storm and your hair will rust in the rain. We could enjoy falafel and it’d be like Lambas in our presense, two kings of the oceans. And you will be Gabriel, ageless and sexless and sexy, and the gap between our years on this Earth will burn between us. I’d have you have me for all eternity, but I’d be content with one day. Ah, Tilda.

Ah, Tilda.

Kedarlaomer (watch out for Hebrew) ponders the difficulty of paper, the love for which he claims to have inherited from his father. This makes me wonder: can you inherit, literally inherit, a fetish? The rustling sound of paper, this titillating dryness of the page: is there a gene somewhere in there which compels these pleasures upon us? Perhaps a long forgotten mutation, spawned eons ago from a gene which made us cautious at the sound of feet approaching or had us long for the touch of skin — useless, but stayed in us by the forces of randmoness that govern all life?

You sit down with a book and sigh and inhale: there are faint smells of trees crashing to the ground and shredded with a thousand metal teeth. Ancient genes, insane by mutation, dream up mammoths brought down and teared apart by hand and eaten raw, and they release this cloud of contentment inside of you. You say, ah. Books. How cultural.

I have a craving for food that’s beyond and after hunger. I want to taste but not to have it go through me, touch me, reach to grab as it slides down. I don’t want it cold or hot on my tongue, crumbly, soft or dry in my teeth. I want just the taste, as a whispery thing, like smoke but thinner than smoke. Anorectic girls, wiry and smart and brooding, must feel like this all the time. There’s a mad twinkle to this thought, anyway: you want to touch but not to consume, to feel but never to feed.

This is how the second day of diets looks like. Strong diets, resolute, permanent, like oak tree roots squeezing the earth. Strong diets are insane, insane. But not feeding and insanity are the same, if the body were allowed to speak; it screams against it with every little spark of its primordial, hidden parts. In little insane moments like this, when you know the ancient mind will yield to you, that it has lost before you even fought it, you feel like this — like a pretty, insane little girl. You want the spirit of things to remain on the tip of your tongue, but their flesh and matter fade from you. You practice saying no to the mad, insistent feeding frenzy of the world. You brood about it. You find strength in brooding.

It’s times like these I think of saffron. It’s never a taste — not in the way spiciness is just a very small pain, but in a more substantial way. You can grapple with its slippery intricacies, you’ll never pin its taste down. It’s both dreamy and light on the roof of your mouth. It hides at times in other tastes, other sensations of the mouth: you lose its trail behind the hardness in bread, and where the juiciness of soft, soft risotto begins. You find it in your mouth, later, in the next dish, like LSD coming back to visit or a ferret peeping from a hole in the ground. It’s red and it’s yellow and it’s really neither yellow-tasting nor red-tasting, and it’s like smoke or like vinegar but like nothing really, just this feeling — of royalness. There’s something festive and austere to it, like the wide swing of a conductor’s wand and trumpets suddenly sounding. This you are sure of: this fancy arc in the air when it touches saffron.

Maybe hunger, mad hunger that is, anorectic-like, is the search for the taste of saffron. This thread — scarlet, no less — hidden under coarser scents and waiting to be hungered for, to be stripped of all tastes and scents for. I want to go look for it even if it’s hiding in dark, dark, heavy woods.

This is what the next few months are about.