Miss Ella indulges in sunlight and a heavily porcine campfire diet, Camp Doran, 2009.
Several months ago I feigned illness and began losing weight; I bought skeleton shirts and cut my hair often. The inner worm ate at me. It was time to reshape comfortable delineations in order to provide for what was to come, to haze out and get abstract so I could see what would come. For the longest time nothing came, I collected Hummels.
Since then I sold my records off save for about twenty, got really into Mozart--I mean more into Mozart, and took to reading with that bygone appetite...a grimy appetite encouraging teeth growth and sleeplessness, not that I needed help--old Peanuts strips, John Fowles novels and Hawthorne. Nabokov, always.
The affinity for thrift store clothes faded into a domestic jones for afghans and quilts; these days I boast a Proustian devotion to my bed. I buy pillows, throws, flannels and shawls. I bought a reading lamp; my pal, J.J., lent me her space heater. There are posters of old shows above my bed, a black and white picture of Leadbelly, and some notable obituaries from The New York Times, including that old favorite of some guy named Leopold B. Felsen, who was "an expert on the property of waves." What a milestone of public life, and what better abstract reference point across which to graze dipping eyelids, then sink leadenly into a well appointed bed. I must get a better mattress, I must bore a skylight through the ceiling. When we are honest with ourselves we are as we are in the deepest plumb of dreams, pursuing unrepentant pillow fights with the genitals of familiars and living in rooms that are both indoors and outdoors, replete with candles, books, a piano, women, the sky, moss, and of course a river.
Tonight, well, this morning, I'll be dozing off to David Lean's magnificent Brief Encounter. It's overdue and I already owe late fees on it. I hope Andrew will accept my Monopoly board game rich guy with out-turned pockets gesture as substitute for remittance. I hope I have that Duke Ellington dream again.
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