Irrational but Real

Originally Posted Monday, October 21, 2013

The late afternoon drifts away into a purplish dusk, warm with a breeze that blows and rattles the southern leaves this mid-October as I drop the pasta into the boiling water on the burner of the outdoor grill.  Sunday stretching toward night.  That silence prevails.  I began drinking mimosas in the afternoon when I met my friends for brunch.  The barmaid flirted and a festive romance danced about.  Oh, she was not quite the one for me, but she was too young to know that yet, and the girl beside me, obviously a model from the fashion show of an evening before, had captured all of my attention.  First I wanted to get her to the studio, then I wanted something different.  Did I feel some cosmic signal, some hippie aura, coming back from her?  But the barmaid was looking at me I could see out of the corner of my eye, and she was not at all bad, just not right, I knew, for me who is always thinking of the long run.  I'd have more fun, of course, if I could think short term, but I was raised a Mormon and some things stick even though they are lousy.  Standing out in the last blue light, having continued brunch with a martini, I decided to open an expensive bottle of champagne.  Relatively.  For me.  You see, I like to live as if I have the kind of money my friends have, but unlike them, I spend everything Iand have nothing left in reserve which is part of the problem when I wake up with the horrors at three a.m.  That and more.  But since there was champagne in the afternoon, I thought, I should see it through, so to speak.  I took a fluted glass of cut crystal that was left over from my wedding so long ago when my life looked more like an issue of Veranda or House and Garden.  True.  It was all nomadic Persian rugs and antique Russian pine and handmade lamps and crystal and deep couches wrapped in brocade.  But I am but a ragamuffin of that life now.  Still, there are remnants, and a bottle of good champagne. . . .

I read tonight and think of the past.  Someone mentioned they saw my ex-wife at the fashion show.  Beautiful, he said, like something from a magazine.  Last night when I couldn't sleep, I rolled over to the opposite side of my king sized bed to that portion where I used to sleep, the unused part of my bed now.  It was a mistake.  I felt all over another girl, not my wife but the next. . . what do I call her?  Girl?  Woman?  It depends on how harsh you wish to be. . . .  There in the agonizing darkness and quiet, I remembered her, so beautiful and desirous. . . and then the night and the darkness and the quiet.

I have to let myself go for the next three months, let myself relax and dream without the need to make anything, without the need to produce.  I have bought a large format archival printer, and I am to meet a fairly important gallery owner soon.  I will have to face myself now, any talent I might have displayed or, more likely, the lack of it. 

Phone calls, dinner. . . I am interrupted. 

*     *     *     *     *

Woke in the night with the horrors again and a throat that was getting sore.  I could not make the bad things go away in the darkness lit by the moon.  In the dark, I realize now, I am suffering something new to me, a paranoia about the future.  It hits me hard in the night.  Irrational but real.  It is the onset of something, I'm afraid, a premonition of things to come.