I couldn't write yesterday. Don't know if I can today. I have nothing to say, really. Life, mine, is a dull, repetitive act of doing exactly the same thing every day without any hope of breaking free. Some people do this voluntarily, I know. In their case, it is by consent. I see it up and down my mother's street. People live without much imagination, comfortable and content with familiarities.
Or so it would seem.
I should say, mine is by consent, too, but somehow it seems more situational. I COULD just walk away, leave my mother in some facility, I guess. That is what people do. It is happening to the woman she travelled much with just now. Her sons and daughters have abandoned her to a nursing home. They don't go to see her.
I can't do that. I am a humanist. A humane romantic. A melancholy fatalist, maybe, built to be forlorn.
I tried shaking myself out of it yesterday. Nope. I'd been taking photos and I dumped them into the computer to see. Not one even remotely good. So I made some fake videos and sent them off to Q. In the first several, I took a younger me and paired it with the present him. I made him my uncle, I guess. That was fun. Then I took another version of me and another version of him set in a Mexican whorehouse. Now I was having fun. Then I took a version of me that would have been the same age that he is now. I paired us with a "worker" in her briefs. The A.I. engine didn't like that much. It kept rejecting every suggestion. But I got a few things. Sent them off to Q. Nor response. Zilch. Bagel.
I'm hoping he doesn't sue.
I took a long afternoon walk. It was hot. My knees and hip and back hurt terribly. My broken and metal ribcage is getting worse. I limped along for miles. It didn't cheer me up. I'd have a difficult time walking the streets of NYC, San Fran, L.A., Mexico City, let alone those great and wonderful Sierras.
I decided to buy some summer, full-legged, loose, blousy linen pants. I've tried before, but they are all "beachy" and not at all that Italian sophisticated I desire. I looked online, but then I had a thought. I'd write to my friend who spent her life as a fashion editor for men's magazines. I wrote her an email. Then. . . well. . . I've been written out of that narrative awhile back, and though she would have responded, I demurred and deleted.
Still, those pants would make me feel wonderful. I decided to look up some from the fashion designers.
Oh, no. Uh-uh. Dior linen pants for men? $1,500. WTF? Armani? $1,700.
No wonder those fuckers look so wonderful. I was prepared to go "expensive," but I hadn't any idea what I was talking about.
I was glad I didn't send the text. I was also lamenting that I didn't marry the rich girl. Those are the kind of things her family always wore.
Selavy.
Travis texted me from Charleston where he and his wife are setting up one of their sons for law school. Oh, Charleston. What a wonderful place. He sent photos from lunches and bars. I longed to go. I sent him information on The Pink House on Chalmers Street, "built between 1694 and 1712, it is one of the oldest surviving structures in the city and once functioned as a colonial alehouse and suspected brothel for passing sailors and pirates." I was there earlier in this century and was able to enter the small downstairs bar and walk the narrow stairway up two floors to see the tiny bedrooms where trades were plied.
Can't do that now, I guess. I read it is now a private residence, and all I could wonder is how they got the smell out.
Now that I think of it, Q may be in Chicago. He said he was going, but I don't remember when.
My mountain buddy texted.
Hanging out this weekend at the Strawberry music festival it feels liberal. Holy shit dude. They are young beautiful hippie chicks everywhere. There’s a lot of guys walking around that look like you too I don’t stare at them very long.
And then, a text from Red.
In Detroit today to dance the weekend.
I told her about The Detroit Club where Ili and I stayed for a few nights in 2019, back when we were travelling.
Oh it’s not far from here. Fly up and stay there Tuesday night with me 😝.
When I got up this morning at six, I had another text she'd sent just a half hour before.
Sorry kid, but even if I were free, I couldn't hang. She scares the shit out of me.
My midwest friend is everywhere, and my best lesbian friend is begging me to go on a photo safari with her.
Everyone is somewhere else.
Four o'clock. Time for me to get back to mother. I'd made us two filet mignons for dinner the night before. I cooked them perfectly. You could cut them with a fork. But I was not in the mood for making a meal last night. I picked up a pizza from the hippie joint.
I drank light beer. I think the nightly pre-dinner cocktail is killing me. I narcotize myself every night with wine and hard liquor knowing that the night will be like the night before and the night before that and the night before that. . . .
I finished the Salter lectures that Travis gave me after dinner.
"I mentioned earlier the freedom of art. I mean by that the freedom not to be bound by common ideas of morality or by any catechism. I mean also the freedom--really the need--to break through any mediating things. There should be no prohibitions on what you are allowed to think or imagine."
After watching a t.v. show lacking in imagination, after mother went to bed, I picked up a book of this year's Pushcart Prize winners. I tried one story after another, but nothing grabbed me. Maybe writing has taken a turn for the worse. Or maybe it is just it suffers from comparison with something like Salter. Whichever way, I was severely disappointed.
Not in those writers, of course, but in myself. I find I have allowed myself to be constrained by a conventional moral order.
I went to bed only to wake in a sweat. The sheets were soaked through. I got up and then went back to bed. Every hour for the rest of the night.
I'm guessing Red was feeling better about the night than I was when I read her text this morning.
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