I met a woman riding by in a convertible, she looked sadly happy, I left her alone, you know, since she wasn’t happily sad, a condition I might not worsen, sadly happy I leave alone — just waved to her there in that Fury III, wondering where she got such a car. It was army duck green; she had orange lipstick, oddly attractive. I saw a woman in a black Ford pickup looking neither sad nor happy. I saw a good saddle shop. I saw a turtle a time or two. I saw kites and hate. I saw obscene rain. I saw, I saw, I saw: vidi, vidi, vidi. That Caesar was a card. He had a tough but variegated line whore. Slap that (whore). I’d be all right if something would go ahead and happen.
Altogether, bye. Life is kapok, a material I do not understand. Lillie Langtry is coming over in her red Maserati, going very fast, to take me to lunch, because her husband, who flies planes on secret missions for the Air Force, is flying a plane on a secret mission for the Air Force, and Lillie is lonely and so am I. That I, too, am lonely I have accidentally tendered as part of the reason Lillie is Maserati-ing over fast and lonely herself, but it is not, of course, my loneliness, that’s part of her motivation. My loneliness, we should say, my horniness, is just happy-accidentally congruent to Lillie’s loneliness, should say horniness. Captain Barfheart in the plane has the unhappily incongruent horniness, but he has all that ordnance and hardware and thrust and fire and speed to compensate, for the nonce, and all I’ve got is me bed, which don’t fly and don’t fly over Europe looking for red menace or over Libya or Iraq looking for sandy menace or lines of death in the sand. And silliness: he who will never admit to quitting will confess, once in a while, that he did a certain and specific silly thing in an uncharacteristic moment. But you can get him to admit he has slept with his mother before you can get him to admit he is silly. He ain’t silly, and he don’t quit. This is why I like the idea of Lillie Langtry coming over. Captain Barfheart ain’t silly and don’t quit — ergo thatair F-16—and Lillie Langtry going to kiss me, which is silly, and she going to keep kissing me till Captain Barfheart come home, when we going to quit. And I will have been silly and I will be a quitter. I am not going to say, Now, Lillie, you run off with me, we can outrun Captain Barfheart and the Air Force and napalm. I am going to say, Lillie, wash your ass and go home, and Lillie, also silly and a quitter, will. Red bird outside, blue bird outside, yellow bird in a cage.
I had me a four-pound canary, I could stop the world. No need to go to Mexico and find pills, either. I could just bust out of here and make it to Pets Aplenty before the pills I already have run out. They got more pills and Dixie cups in here than Las Vegas got dice and cups. Hmm, hmm, than liver got iron. Hmm, hmm, than water got wet. Hmm, hmm, than Howdy Doody got freckles — no, doodoo. It is a pleasure for an adult to say doodoo. I could just spray-paint me a owl. I believe they have a owl what is yellow anyway; I could just say it is a canary. Here is a canary. I am pretty sure he will eat yours. If your canary is lonely, put him in there with mine, I am pretty sure he won’t be lonely after that. You silly son of a bitch. Cease pining for your Tweety-bird posthaste.
Why I’m in here, all this untethered aggression. Wanting a owl canary. Like wanting a dog lion. A minnow killer whale. Put your mouse on that ice cube in the aquarium and my minnow will knock him off it and we can see if your mouse can swim, then let’s jerk off, okay?
Life is ash. I prefer a cloudy day early in the week, a sunny day late. Lillie has a fine smooth adulterated ass, heart-shaped and firm and edible like a Carvel cake. If Captain Barfheart called in a air strike, strafed the primitive village of my bedroom, it would be all right, provided Lillie and I were done. I’d have a calm moment there, still flushed with the testosterone ground fire, to think, I did not get anything I did not deserve. This would mean, neatly, and unusually — because usually something don’t mean two things at once unless it’s idiotic or, worse, cute (deliberately ambiguous) — that I deserved the bombing and that I deserved Lillie. A good piece of ass gets you blown well to pieces, and just what is wrong with that? What is subject to the appellate process, due or no, about that? If more folk would take a deep breath and take their being blown to hell, it would be a better place. Instead, it’s: I don’t quit, am not silly, and will not die. Someone else will be silly, quit, and die before I do. What would be funny would be if everybody had a statistician clocking him and posting his win-lose ratios on him, like LED tattoos. Marriage: 3–2. Child-support payments: 437-23. Get-rich-quick schemes: 0–6. Ideas: 2-567. Cars: 1-34. Sexual impulses to fruition: 6,784-21. Fruition to friendship: 18-3. Friendship: 0–3. Jobs resigned/fired: 8-13. Overall life slugging average:.183.
The ramparts about the Silly Castle would begin to crumble quickly. Life is sidewalk. Sidewalk is more crack than walk. All walk is side walk. Wabash, Wabash cannonball, downtown to the soul-food mall, not chitterlings but Nikes.
Decembre LX7, or sometime. I had a conversation with a mid-level Brit. I understand that is a coarse, if not crude, way of putting it, that they can place themselves to the millimeter in the graduated social cylinder in which they teem by hearing a sentence or two. I can deduce Not the Prince and Not a Cockney, leaving a vast middle ground where I don’t know if my man went to public versus private, etc. Anyway, had one of these fellows, he took some umbrage or another, and I found myself “informing” him of “my position” in this fine, hair-splitting disquisition which suggested I wasn’t a colonist but one of the true Empire cross, like himself, and this surprised him about as much as it did me. Unfortunately, or not, I have forgotten the speech and its concerns entire, and tell it now only because I know nothing else to tell. Life is lull. Life is many things other than personal-aggrandizement options and clear thinking about them. This is why people start getting excited at the prospect of hurricanes and kamikaze and death camps and bank robberies and such.
I know a man who is dying, and I should call him up. What stops me, for the moment, is knowing it will come to saying, “Jerry, I know that you are dying and I thought I should call you up.” Actually, it will come of course to not saying that, when it is perfectly obvious to both of us that that is what is being said, and there we will be, in a Final Moment, lying. I will be lying to a dying man, a dying man will be lying to me, and we will feel worse than if I had not called at all. One fewer call, two fewer lies, humankind soars into the side of the barn. I do not understand, or expect anyone else to, that last little conceit. We fly gracefully, tactfully, a few minutes more, but into the wall of hick domesticity, even as one of us dies. Mayhaps I meant that. I know a girl named Tina who has thick ankles, but they support sturdy legs. She shaves these, and runs with these, and accuses men of sexually harassing her. I suspect they are not guilty. I know another woman who holds the same job Tina once did who has slender ankles supporting perfect legs, on which she does not, to my knowledge, run. She does not accuse men of sexually harassing her. I suspect they are guilty.
I suspect I am guilty. Of what is vague, so what I’d like to do is confess to everything, serve my time, and come out clean and debtless to Society. Just go in for about, oh, thirty years, read some books and be buggered, try to stay in shape, and come out clean-slated. Until, I suppose, you talked to someone, you would not be guilty of anything. You could be very careful about what you did, what you acquired, whom you promised what, and maybe you could remain innocent in a way you really had no chance to as a child, coming out of that prison. You would be in a position to tell the world where to get off the bus. I remember seeing Tom Snyder say to Charles Manson, “Charles, get off the space shuttle.” This was in response to Charles’s affecting to not know about the murders, which piqued Tom. Charles is in a position to say, Get off the space shuttle to the world. Next to Hitler he is the Hamburglar. But.