Pride and Burnt Potatoes

The pizza guy sees the TV behind me—Pride and Prejudice playing, Keira Knightley—and says I’m a classics fan. I’m just standing there because I burnt the Bratkartoffeln too badly to fix it. Blackened edges, the smell of failure. I take the pizza, nod, don’t explain.

It’s a gorgeous film, and I’ve been sort of stuck on it. The language specifically. Every sentence is built with care, and watching something like that makes you suddenly feel the degradation in how we actually speak. Modern language is just less. I’m not talking about the cheap romantic stuff they teach in school. Real poetry. Words that exist because someone needs to move people, to make them understand something true. That careful construction versus just throwing words at a thought. The difference is real.

Going to bed before this chemical lucidity wears off. The film’s score is genuinely beautiful. I can feel it slipping already, that moment where you can still construct actual thoughts getting fuzzy around the edges. Whatever the hell was on that pizza.