Another day, still here. Another fat boy has manifested. He tapped on a window on the side of the house and I steered him to the front door. He had a laminated card identifying himself, avec photo, currently dated, as a collector for the handicapped. He was very relaxed, made a joke about someone going down the street. I explained that I do not speak well, and his apparent answer was, Well, it’s for the handicapped, what need is there for speech or further comprehension? I gave him a small handful of change, he manifested momentary disappointment, then quickly assented that it was good, C’est bon. Probably legitimate. It has upset the day of the coward. Giving a small amount of change to a probably legitimate undertaking, or to a possibly illegitimate undertaking, is perfect cowardice. Deciding the venture was real or fraudulent either way and giving nothing, slamming the door, or deciding it was maybe real or even fraudulent and giving a goodly sum, flank the act of cowardice and have about them vapors of courage. You will not find me on those flanks. I am in the very center of fear and being small. A fat boy on the streets of France knows it.
And what would you say, Sir, to the chance we might mount a draft horse in chain mail and swarp down the enemy in rows like wheat?
Aye, bonnie good that, let’s do, and then let’s try not to dissect the swarping of our fellows and find less in it than heroism. Will we be able to manage that?
I am only thy valet, Sire. I can put thee on the mount, I cannot determine how thou ridest.
Cry for Help from Home
My grandfather kept bees. I never saw him at this enterprise and do not know precisely how I know that he pursued it. I have had the urge to have bees myself but so far have not procured a single bee. My father was a gambler. I think that was his essence. In high school he hustled pool halls, in WWII he joined the Marines before being drafted, in life he struck out in entrepreneurial ventures and real-estate developments. In his last hours he escaped the house and walked to the 7-Eleven and bought a lottery card, got lost and tired on the way home, and was brought to the door by two women who wanted to know if they could keep him. They had found him sitting on their low garden wall, they found him charming, and they brought him home. I have never gambled on a thing in my life.
Cry For Help from the Theater of Love
Jogging along lightly, nude, I encounter some Vermont-hiker-looking folk before I can cut off the road so say, “Finally tried out some really light backpacking ha!” and cut for the house, crossing the porch on which I had not noticed the preponderance of trash before, but I had only crossed the porch the one time before, ten minutes ago, and inside told the woman that I’d unfortunately run into the neighbors and she said, “And you would have to come in here.” She was immediately busy with two children on an articulation table of some sort, I thought at first an abdominal-exercise machine, and I suppose by one argument it was but it was finally more technical than that. And the older child on one end of the table that I took to have Down syndrome got up and crawled onto the smaller child at the other end of the table and affected to smother it with a lawn chair, to everyone’s delight, and I noticed through a window back toward the porch two girls exercising in wheelchairs, pulling themselves therapeutically up and down the room, one of these girls apparently disfigured or mutilated and covered up and the other absolutely striking but paralyzed in the legs, and ho, this was a bit of a rough scene here all of a sudden, where ten minutes ago this woman had just offered herself without all these complications, just these perfect rouge silver-dollar areolae in an open shirt, which is why I had gone down to the pond and washed up and jogged back, and found all this. Man. Locating succor is getting hard.
Longing
The kind of exhaustion I am talking about is, simply, or not simply, the broken heart. It makes you long to hold hands with someone you have not hurt who has not hurt you. This longing would be immediately and hotly extant if a dark girl offered you a cup of flan.
Dizzy
The aerie feather-brained quality is upon me today, I am slightly dizzy and nauseated. Got to ride over to the foundry and smelt some ore. My eyeglasses are featuring that snot-smeared effect. I hate that. My buddy was chased by a pack of dogs that scared him so bad he shat a little in his pants, and he hates that. I knew several distinguished older men who have died who had a better grip on things than I do. I wonder if they can see me floundering. I know that one of them in particular, with a scotch and pretty women about him in heaven, would enjoy sending annoying telegrams of advice like “Buck up” if he could. Most of them, though, I suppose would elect not to send a telegram even if they could. This is why they were regarded as distinguished on earth. They had the astute capacity not to deign, presume, meddle. They hunkered down within the castle walls of their particular potency, whatever it was, and did not send loose emissary of themselves about the uncharted ground of their purlieu.
It seems to me that if you do not deign, presume, and meddle, though, that the forces of the world at large, sometimes in the form of a kind of anonymous aggregate power, will pile up on you in an ambient deigning and presuming and meddling that will render you helpless. It is this way today: I am helpless here, dizzy and looking through badly fouled glasses at the bright, challenging world. Of course a non-anonymous, specific, particular force can deign, presume, and meddle with you also, like the phone company, or Ms. Trujillo at the phone company, who might withal be said to be but an accidental agent of aggregate force. But if, say — oh, you get the picture, you must, you are in the picture yourself. If you don’t get the picture and fancy yourself not in it, I would say you are deigning to presume and are meddling with me, tacitly accusing me of being off rocker a bit. You are part of the problem. But I do not think that you are part of the problem. I think you are with me. I think you and I could dance across this floor of doubt in a cuddly promenade if we could know what our feet are up to. If I knew what my feet were up to, I would be distinguished, alive or dead. It is easier to be distinguished dead than alive.