Writhing in Apathy?

I tease Larissa (another attendant of the wedding below) about whether anyone her age has yet earned the right to use a phrase coined in his diaries by the brilliant English theater critic and writer Kenneth Tynan when he was dying of emphysema in his fifties-- but no matter. "Writhing" is a brilliantly funny ongoing (I hope) account of a young actress's life in New York. But it is also about food, accidental meetings, cockroaches-- let me qoute a bit on the last subject:

"July 8th: Yesterday, in a moment of incomprehensible forgetfulness, I breezed right into my bedroom with nary a thought as to the danger that lay in wait for me there. In my obliviousness, I turned to my wall mirror and picked my mascara out of the tin cup on the shelf beneath it. Just as I was lifting the wand to my lashes, I caught sight of something else in the mirror, to the bottom right of my face. I spun around. There, in full view, smugly eyeing me from atop my nightstand, was the cockroach. It made no attempt to scurry away, hide, or even take flight; it just sat there like a sphinx, unmoving except for its antennae, inches long and all a-twirl. I half expected to see a lonely tumbleweed drift past us and hear plaintive whistling in the distance. I reached down with my left hand, picked the plastic bag from Gristedes up off the floor, and slowly walked to the shelf. With wrath swift and god-like I swung the bag forward over the stand while with my mascara wand I knocked the beast into it, immediately tying the handles together in triple knots. Crunch, crunch,…..crunchcrunchcrunch it went, imprisoned and frustrated. This Gristedes bag was the kind made of unusually thick, crinkly plastic, so every step the leviathan took crackled like hellfire, which I interpret as heavily symbolic. I was about to take the bag outside and throw it into a waste bin when I realized that, as I was now safe, my molester all imprisoned, I could just leave it where it was and let it think on what it had done for a while. I turned the nightstand lamp on next to it, so it might contemplate its sins in the harsh glare of righteousness. I slept that night in the living room.


"July 10th, 2005: Crunch, crunch, crunch….The prisoner, whom I now call Gregor, shows no signs of wilting. Three days with no food or water has had little discernable effect on his vitality. I examine his bag every few hours and watch the almost beautiful play of light and shadow he makes as he crawls this way and that, his body silhouetted against the wrinkled plastic walls, now sharper as he bears down close to the wall, now blurrier as he ruffles his wings and stretches his insect legs. The scene is Chekhovian in its sadness: the seagull has wandered far from his home and rightful place and thus must die, unnaturally, and in a strange land. Crunch, crunch, crunch…I wonder how it all will end. I remember my mother telling me as a child that a cockroach can live for three months on a crumb of food too small for the human eye to see. Perhaps Gregor will enjoy such longevity, crunching away on my nightstand as summer ripens and fades into fall and the leaves start to change, as people marry and divorce, grandparents die and babies are born. He will wander till he expires in his crinkly white limbo, with only the memory of the bustling outer world, its sewers and basements, dropped icecream cones and spilt soda, sleeping females and closets filled with silks, to sustain him in his final hours. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, my Gregor."