Yes, yes, we've all heard the philosophers babble about "oneness" being "beautiful" and "holy".

[kingtycoon]

Ugh.

My winter skin, I look terrible. But Posterity requires verisimilitude. I'm harassed feeling and beaten feeling and low. Just Low, not down - there are, of course, grades of difference in the downward trajectories, in the subterranean conditions. I can still see the sun, the sky and the silmarils glittering in the firmament - it's not burial I lament just now, just recumbence.

Strong, powerful sleeping lately - and bad sniffles. Walking in the dark I take Agatha down to her mother's house it's dark and cold and there's a perfection in it, but also a bitter badness - wintercold, snifflenose. I don't want to go but do. I'm a grouch from improper food and a reversal of nicotine. It's fine. She has some curiosity and I explain why it is that Only Nixon Could Go To China. (Thinking, if only, if only, my father had told me! Had shared the facts of Triangular Diplomacy with me when I was 10!)

Stumble home alone and feel guiltlessly relieved to be alone, because I'm not well, and because that kid has spent the weekend ignoring me in favor of shows - well, not ignoring, but she camps out in her good time of internet and shows and 3DS and drawings and books- it's a good life, and I get it. She's not allowed the hyperstimulation at her mother's house so she gorges at mine. Silly beliefs being the prevailing sort. It's too cold for outside.

But I stand in wait for the buses all morning. The #10 - so late, so badly late, and all of us feeling, down on Euclid Ave where it's 10 degrees colder for unearthly reasons (I blame the wickedness of Hannah, the evil of the Fin de siècle republicans- Ohioans all. Maybe it's the shadow of McKinley's monument- ghosts of the American Anarchists, chilling us all.) We stand and wait and ladies of the right temperament are not shy to berate and shame the driver, who is new-looking, new-seeming, and late, badly late on a day when we all feel like prompt attention to our frostbite is the difference between 10 or 7 toes. Between and odd and even number of extremities, between prime and factorial limbs.

Then work is a strange dull focus- attentive resolution - seeing, watching - there's a feeling, when you've quit the cigarettes - that 'I could do this - forever - because when you schedule your cigarette moments into your day - then, nothing is forever, all is fleeting. Is this the dialogue of the smoker and the abstainer? "I rush to conclude and rush to conclude that I am in a rush to conclude this conversation for I must go, and do a thing!" The abstainer replies: "It's nice to meet you."


Skin dried up and hellish, I'm a wreck! A ruin, but of something... Vanity, you know - I'm a ruin, for sure, but of some Mughal palace, some paradise, now still lovely though sadly solitary - eerie, you'd say, wandering, and why would they leave this behind? You'll stare and wonder and start to suspect ancient astronauts.

Meantime my co-workers, they think it's past strange that I don't take a lunch, I collect their offerings and sometimes, in emergency, I fashion these prizes into a meal. Sometimes. Not today, I've got the cold to keep me warm.