And when she reaches my seat at last and asks what I want: "Cotes du Rhone," I declare, though I could just as easily say that I want red wine, and why I ask for Cotes du Rhone therefore makes no sense at all, except that last week when I took this flight they offered me Bordeaux and it was so vile that next time I asked for something else, and they gave me Cotes du Rhone. So perhaps after all there is some rhyme or reason in my asking for Cotes du Rhone, though if anything it's premature and therefore specious reasoning, since I've yet to establish if they even have Cotes du Rhone; it's simply that I don't want that Bordeaux again. But hearing myself say Cotes du Rhone, how pretentious it all sounds. I've always despised you, I say to myself, yes, you: You think I make bones about saying it? But honestly, this really takes the biscuit; you just go from strength to strength, don't you? Just how long do you think you can keep this up? Because I'm sick of it already; stop that already, as the Americans would say. If you were going to ask for anything by name, if you really want to sell your soul that way, it should at least be Cotes du Rhone Villages, and that's the observation of someone who knows nothing about wine, who can only parrot a few things other people have told him about it, and who only repeats them now because he has actually observed them to be true. But this does nothing to derogate from the embarrassment of asking for things one either doesn't know completely, or isn't known to know completely, opening the floodgates for insincerity and caprice, and, in plain, disgusting oneself.

And then, to cap it all, she ends up giving me Bordeaux instead, and when I taste it I realise that it isn't so bad as I remember, or perhaps this one is better than the last one, or more probably I don't know the difference between anything and am just making pointless distinctions as usual because my mind isn't content simply spouting vacuities, but has to do one better, it has to create for itself a semblance of identity, and so, deep down in some realm unknown to me, it's decided it's going to pontificate about red wine. I have to live with this on a daily basis and it really grows quite wearisome at times; sometimes I feel I can hardly open my mouth without biting my head off, but that's just how it is, and the best I can do is to keep my mouth shut and try not to piss myself off too much. Of course the argument's alluring: I'd love to believe that deep down there were some complicated structure, something noble and incremental, that is to say, something perfective becoming established. But I know the reality is infinitely different - my mind wanders from here to there, and then, for no reason at all, back to where it started, and on the way it picks up and then abandons a host of irrelevant objects, and this dementia is a process naively referred to as living.