Well, by that I mean, since you ask, pancakes the size of Rockefeller dimes. Yes, you are right, not odd under the circumstances, given that they were pancakes for salamanders. Not odd at all. I have seen on a grown woman nipples the size of Rockefeller dimes, and that is odder than such a pancake fit for a salamander. To see those little dry pancakes going happily into those moist mouths was perhaps what I meant was odd. I have trouble meaning what I mean these days. I have trouble meaning anything at all. Am I not a grown man concerned with salamanders who cook, like cartoon characters? Can I actually mean this? To mean something you have to be capable of making a muscle with your brain, of bearing down mentally. I can no longer bear down. While this disturbs somewhat, it also does not disturb. If you can’t bear down, nothing much bears down on you. If you are preoccupied with salamanders in the kitchen, it is as agreeable as being preoccupied by anything else, or by nothing at all.
We might as well forget the salamanders and their pancakes. We are free to move on to other concerns. I have none, but you perhaps have some. They would relate to the world, most probably — certainly they would relate to the world as opposed to the otherworld, a phrase that is attractive, as indeed we find the otherworld, whatever we mean by it, more attractive than the world. Why is this so, that we like a world that we can but feebly and variously only imagine exists over one in plain view before us? Is it not because the one before us is, in the parlance of the more eloquent of our children, messed up? We have so messed up the situation here that we prefer to think of an afterlife of beatitudes, or if we are not given to that sentimentality we select a finer one, a world not after but parallel and supernatural, usually peopled not by people but by weirdnesses made of goo and capable of thinking better than we do and fighting with more sophisticated weapons. Even the odd salamander who can cook will do. Why do we seek these other places full of alien forms? Is it because people are one big piece of shit? I verily submit that this is so. When you have reached this position, there is not a lot of what gets called wiggle room, and you don’t feel like playing outside, or inside, anymore.
I have been traded back to my original team, which still does not want me. I play, and do not play, unwanted. It is not an enviable position, and I do not want to talk about it. I would rather talk about retardation, its onset and advance, considerable in my case, leading to my streamlighting into an ocean of ineptitude.
My testosterone has dried up. I never had courage, and now have not even bluster. This would be humiliating had I still balls. As it is, even humiliation is neutral. Some of you out there can understand this. Together we constitute a large human club but we are of course clubless. We do not require private rooms for our elite lounges. We sit on a bench here, stand on a corner there. We hardly remember our mothers and do not care. Or we do and we do care. There is no difference in what we do or do not do.
I am a goof guitar player, I believed in good shoes briefly but that belief too has succumbed to a risible and quaint erstwhile passionism, I will now go to bed. Lay me down to sleep, Jesus, you old bullyrag who first discovered these things I know.
The Flood Parade
I get back from the flood parade — a small flash flood is let through the streets to entertain the people — and discover my apartment filled with graduate students invited there by a colleague. They are watching television and he is testing a blowgun. I sit on a sofa next to a student. On the TV screen is a show featuring an actress I recognize as playing Miss Brooks from the show Our Miss Brooks; the actress appears to be the daughter of the woman who originally played Miss Brooks, Eve Arden. I inquire of the room if this is the daughter of Eve Arden and the students confirm it as if it is something everyone knows. They cannot possibly themselves know the show Our Miss Brooks or Eve Arden; their knowledge of popular culture is boundless if they know this to be Eve Arden’s daughter without knowing Eve Arden. The woman next to me lets her hand fall to my collar and does not remove it. I touch her hand there and we engage hands; she plays with my ear and I play with her fingers. She leans over me to adjust the TV and I see her breast, about the size and contour of a Hershey’s kiss. The party becomes very thick and this woman and I make a tour through it holding hands. We discover that we have flirted before and that I learned earlier that she is not available because she is involved with a young man some distance away who has threatened to kill himself if she leaves him. My position is that such an arrangement is unfortunate, and the woman agrees. A second woman at this point begins to vie for my affection in front of the first and I allow it to develop, watching the reaction of the first woman, whom I want badly. It is clear that she has taken her moral position with the welfare of suicides in mind. I drift around the party and discover I am in my underwear, not unlike the bulk of the partiers, but I nonetheless feel a little underdressed. I resolve to leave.
Getting You Some Cocktail
A cute girl with a nice pink backpack with a white cat in leaping silhouette on it has just gone by the window on a moped. I don’t need her.
Last night a woman came and laid herself across both arms of the overstuffed chair I was in and asked if I did not want “some cocktail.” I said I did not know what “some cocktail” could mean but that I guess I wanted some. I touched her stomach. She was on one elbow across the arms of the chair and her stomach was firm. I’ll have cocktail if that’s the thing to have, I said. I admired the tension of her stomach that I had touched but did not so comment. She knew that I admired the tension of her stomach but did not so comment. I teared up a bit. She touched the side of my face, paying attention at the same time to people behind the chair who might witness this. This woman was vaguely redheaded but not in that arsenical juicy weird true-redheaded way. She was bleached out by troubles of her own, but holding it together. She was going to engineer to get me some cocktail and see that I had a decent time. I was most thankful to her.
Solitude
We were so loaded that these loose bricks outside Bobby’s place floated around in the house with us, directed by gentle commands like “Here, boy.” They wanted to float into the refrigerator when you looked for beer in there and you had to shoo them out. We did not want to asphyxiate a brick in the refrigerator.
The meeting of the World Stone Club was called to order. Bobby started to read the agenda and the order broke down. Janey Farrington said all the girls were tired of taking off their shirts like it was the sixties and Julian said so what he was tired of his own name and wasn’t going to do that anymore either. This was funny, not going to “do” his name, like a drug, so Phyllis took her shirt off and showed herself to Julian and Julian said he wasn’t tired of that yet and he should not have been because in point of fact the shirts-off accord was best intended or designed or I should say, well I don’t know what I should say except that it was Phyllis above all the girls, maybe really by that point she was the only girl, who had any business taking her shirt off, aesthetically speaking. She has ski slopes and puffies and it gave you a buzz.