Le temps des secrets. The heart of the V/series.

I wish I really had work instead of just writing about it. It would be so much more fruitful. I mean how many stories can you wring out of just a few days work. You see I am a deadbeat here in france. It's not by choice I just can’t find work, even immigrant work. There are french people taking those minimum wage, off the book jobs that I wish were reserved for immigrant workers. Times are tough, la crise is here too.

I had my two days work and then it was good bye. My vigneron is just a guy who delivered my wood. He said he had a couple of days work. I did spend a few days in the vines and they were great. I have to admit though, the stories of work in the fields are conjured of old dreams from the days when I would walk around my village.

You know, the one where I used to live. The one that my, sometime hopefully in the future, ex-wife (unlike President Sarkozy who got his divorce in two months, mine now trains on into it’s fourth year. It is exactly where it started regardless of two decisions rendered. Did I just hear someone calling for another appeal) is still in. It’s where she hoards my children.

Being without a job does have it’s privileges. At the time (when I was married and in St Jean B) one of those was walks out in the french countryside. You must believe that all those beautiful things I told you that I saw in the vines are true, even if how I got to see them wasn’t. That little village was so romantic a place that everyone who moved there became some kind of writer, or at least a painter.

It had that kind of effect on me too when I walked around among the vineyards and olives and little garden plots. It’s deep south of france country, it makes you want to be a paysan. Not being able to become one, I tried for a Marcel Pagnol kind of thing. You know writing about the paysans as if you lived among the paysans.

I would sit in the fields and watch them go about their work. One season following another. Quite nice, but once back in the house my wife would walk in after her job and the romantic story would become a slasher film. I gave up one and by consequence the other. Now I have no house, kids or job. It’s for that I fell back to fabricating stories. Churning up the memories of walking in my little village town watching the workers in the vineyards made me nostalgic, romantic. All my free time got me wanting to be Marcel Pagnol again. Create a bit of that famous french romance.

I have a lot of romance, the only thing I don’t have is money Now thanks to my one time in the future ex-wife who just made a new appeal to the French Judiciary I won’t have any for the considerable future. I need a job, a lawyer, and a new file to go alongside the one on my desk which is already over filled with he said, she said, legal mumbo jumbo collected over 3 years.

I feel like I just got re-upped, against my will, for another stint in the army. In a romantic world I would say the french foreign legion, but I’m not feeling romantic. That’s why I figured I would confess and tell you that all the stories I’ve been telling you about my work in the vines were a lie, well not a lie, just a story. I don’t feel like any more stories about romantic worlds. In the future I promise to try to be more honest with mes petites histoires de mon vie en france. Starting today.

I wanted you to know, just so that in the end there won’t be any misunderstandings.