Sunny, fair, down-to-the-water cloudy, I go. My pants are fitting not well, my shoes seem askance independent of my feet, I hear the odd wailing noise in one ear. I fancy eating some sugar, good crystalline gob of it partially dissolved in thin coffee. One of those two-stage plastic cup-and-base rigs be nice, white cup like a space capsule, detaches for orbit into the garbage when the bum they’ve sold it to is through with it down to the Krispy Kreme. Yessiree, I’ma headed down to the water for a doughnut and a very white plastic cup of coffee, which I will be allowed nay expected to call by some hip street appellative: Give me a cup o’ that Java, miss, some o’ that mud, tee-hee. Life.
Use of this product may be hazardous to your health — I read on the door to the Jules Vermin Studio of Dance. So I went in. There were floor marshals from ACE and Civil Defense around the floor, and the couples were belted together and helmeted and wearing boxing groin guards. They stepped only on painted yellow footprints on the floor. It was explained by a taped message playing repeatedly that a certain kind of neck strain might result from looking constantly at the footprints but that this was preferable to the kinds of injuries that would result from looking up. No one looked up. The marshals seemed satisfied, most satisfied. I suddenly wanted to eat some Japanese food and retired from the Jules Vermin Studio without receiving any instruction. And knew in a vision that were Mrs. M. and I ever to dance it would be in the moonlight and we would not watch where we were going. How hard to do, I thought, but how obvious it is that you should live every day as though you are dying. Why do only brain-tumor folk seem to actually get on this with any arguable grip? Them and, say, junkies. Them and junkies and, say, preachers. Them and junkies and preachers and, say, people who want you to invest in their real-estate scam? And the ACE marshals want you to live as if this is not the last day of your life. Why, it occurs to me to ask, does anybody care how I live my life? First, last, what is it to you? Who are you? If you are fired up about how I live this day, what are you doing with yourn? That what I wantn know. I talkn funny, so what. I been sick. When you sick you say things. You say things today you might not be able to say tomorrow. You say things today you might not be able to say tomorrow when you not sick, people say you a artist. People say you a artist you say anything come to mind or come to not mind. Ray Charles, boy. Thing come to mind, say it; thing come to not mind, say it. Not mind be body? Thing come to body, say it; body catch a body comin’ thew the rye. Nobody got the leapest idea what rye is anymore, might as well say if a body catch a body comin’ thew the prom.
I believe in many things, none of which comes to mind. I am in arrears pillwise.
I am a demographer in the demopolis. I am of a fragile solidity, like Aristotle. I—
Lord, how time flies when the tourniquet is on. Little Tod M.’s big old hog breathes idle in his garage. I been down but not like this before. You don’t shoe horses without their walking on your back. The bluebottle fly is a thing of the past. Tawdry sentiments dress like women. People behave like their mothers. I’m down to my last dime. Forever is a chute of bugs in a thimble of sense. Sweeteners go to hell. Be patient, my pretty, the sandman uses the postal service just like everybody else wears his pants. Downtown it is holy. Before the Lord has had his way He will have slept. Before time began there was no money. Now they say time is money. I refute that. Anybody could.
Anybody could do anything, and sooner or later everybody has. It’s a mess and I’m hungry. The womb has to dilate before people can get out. They in there saying “Hep me!” behind a sphincter. My knowledge of medicine does not exceed that of the average layman. Of this I am proud. I know doctors whose knowledge of medicine does not exceed that of a layman and I would as soon not be associated with them. If anyone suggests there’s a goddamned thing wrong with eating soft bread, he is not a doctor. I fell hard as a child for the fiery hot non-chewable gumball, or it wasn’t a gunball—gumball — must have been called a jawbreaker. They were a fine invention on the plane of human nonnecessity, on which plane we need more play. I am probably a classical anarchist, but have no classical education or manners. Blue porcelain that is not too delicate is a good thing. A hayride with a buxom laughing lass of East European stock is a good thong, I mean thing. Drinking some wine and ravishing her should she want that, also. If she does not, hail fellow well met and get out of the wagon in a good homey spray of moonlight and be of good cheer. She should be, too. If she is not, attribute it to the rotten modern world along with everything else that rightly displace. The stray straw on your person brush incompletely off entering the solid, below-grade, amber-lit tavern that warmly invites you to its bosom for the night. Say practical things, and not an abundance of them, to the company of the evening. Do not discuss annuities or topics such as that. Be hearty and agreeably tired, like everyone else behaving himself. That is a good mantra, not just tonight but always: I want us all to behave ourselves (chuckle).
I am withering on the vine of the afternoon of my afterlife, having consumed my afterbirth. Et my own. Became perennially hungry. Mrs. M. I am afraid is at the door. Glowering:
— What is the matter with you?
— Madame, what is not?
— You a pederast? Throws hip out.
— I have many faults, and some I do not know about, but that inclination is not among the known or the unknown, I fain. (She appears mollified, to soften; I am encouraged to issue some more.) Though we would be remiss not to entertain what Coleridge intended to say when he spoke of things visible and not in the universe: people, he tried to say — but couldn’t because the Romantic Age disallowed the diction, let alone the sentiment — people are much more a piece of shit than not a piece of shit—
Mrs. M. has slammed the door and left. I can’t afford to worry the matter of her errant accusation, truly ungrounded, any more than one can afford to worry the matter of exclusion from jury duty. Whatever else may be said about the modern world, you can securely say that if you are seated on a jury today there is something irretrievably wrong with you and at least one team of lawyers, who are troubled themselves, knows it.
Had dog, dog died. Been in stir, got out. I think sometimes of lovely things, the slender turquoise glass on a white table in the black room. There is nothing else in the room. There is not the mateless sock, the canned-ham can in the plastic garbage pail, the torn mail, the carpet, the lowering ceiling, the mortgaged walls, the crudescence of life, the chaff of slow daily dying (unsolicited credit-card applications). Only the aqua vase on white on black, no flower necessary to behold its beauty. A large fire needs be set around the vase. That is house-cleaning beyond the tolerances of the bourgeois.