[FEBRUARY 2008.]
Fifty years in the future: climate change has wrecked agriculture and my mother is trying to feed me an earthworm casserole because that’s the only protein source left. I am taking it with bad grace. Pouting in the bathroom.
A news article about Hillary Clinton: “Also, she can be cruel. She enjoys wearing $1 billion dresses, one of which is made from the fleece of an endangered penguin.”
A billion? Can that be right?
J. says my dreams are getting way too literal. The Traumarbeit is lying down on the job.
I am lying down on the job. I wrote fifteen pages of generalities which were supposed to get me into The Golden Bowl but instead all ended up on the order of: “The defining thing about the nineteenth century is X.” So I need to start over again and hollow out that golden bowl from the inside. I did go to the hardware store, got some tape to stick up a mirror, lithium batteries for a bike light for the new purple bike, which now gets me to campus and back even in the rain. Work those thighs, private. Also, the fact that Obama wants to be my commander-in-chief may be slightly hot.
[bike light: blink]
earthworms were one of your favorite foods as a child!
50 years from now you're 80 years old and still living with your mother? Jeez
Seventy-NINE, thank you.
the fleece of an endangered penguin? can THAT be right?
Free WiFi in the Reno airport. Nice job on that, fellas. Earlier today I had a nice walk to a Starbucks in that sharp, slanted light that lets you know you’re in an arid land—and the concrete goes on and on and on.
The impersonal they were running a photo this morning of the junior senator from Illinois going to Dunkin’ Donuts and getting coffee for his camapign workers, and aw jeez, COFFEE! I got to admit, it made me feel a little like Nikolai feels in War and Peace when he sees the czar. I had forgotten, until Fred reminded me in New York, that the 2004 election had made me write this (but if you’re going to browse that November, don’t scroll down to the stupid shit I wrote about politics; scroll up to Lord Kensington).
Airports used to treat me horribly because I always thought I was living in the wrong place—flying back to Iowa, I would want to get on the plane to Tucson, flying to Tucson I would want the plane to Portland. Only just now I saw that old Portland plane, and was happy it was doing its job, but felt no need to run after it—I have my boarding pass to Oakland and I have to get home, brothers and sisters, to the life we are making.
