I now live in a window.
Me, some curtain trousers and a regency frock coat that I brought along this morning because I thought it might be a good match. Barbara Cartland, love, spirituality. Whatever random stuff is in your head. Beefed up by the endless random stuff-mine in mine.
Lou came by which was beautiful and strange. I had just been given a young volunteer to steward people in and out. We didn’t really get time to connect. It can be pretty much a full time job, being the windowtherapypanda. Still, I was delighted to see her – a rarity in London.
Today I met Jim Bob, and we talked about age, about love and about expectations. I met Paulina and we talked about making art and the balance of surrendering control versus keeping it. I’m aware I’m on that knife edge, where Amy trusts me to be her Panda and keep things true to her vision, but she lets me riff. My conversations went everywhere people wanted them to. I even had some curious connections made by Daniel who was angry on my behalf that the Panda community was being blamed for the pandemic because of similar sounding words. “I know,” I complained. “And it doesn’t help that I’m from China. But people make connections, they want things to make sense and the internet amplifies their pattern matching. Panda, pandemic: it’s a coincidence. But you can’t tell that to the devotees.” Lovely. Another person really wanted to talk about Rat Kings and what they might be capable of. Interstellar travel? Time dilation? Psychic communication of course. I enjoy the rat king Mythos, and I suspect that the person talking about them was surprised that I could hold my own on such an obscure topic. This is no ordinary Panda. This is geekpanda.
This will be two weeks of my life. I would be very glad to talk to you – slots are bookable online and right now it’s fucked as two people who don’t know each other can book the same slot. That happened three times today. I’m ok if you don’t book slots as there’s nowhere to hide and if it’s back to back it’s fucking miserable after a while as I discovered this evening. The head just gets hot hot hot and after a while your brain is too cooked to be courteous and engaged. In an ideal world, I would have a little place to retire to. But I reckon I can just organise it so the volunteers don’t overlap traffic…
AlBarclay 