Reality Check

Once in a while I find it necessary to touch base. Olly olly in free. Hadn't realized how tired I was. More flies than usual but they seem sluggish in the heat and I catch them out of the air in a bare hand and slam them against the wall. It's not a sport, exactly, but it keeps me nimble, a goal keeper. They've rented out the museum for a Democratic Fund Raiser while the Construction Show is installed and I sense a recipe for disaster, but hold my tongue. It'll probably be fine. I'm a paranoid bastard and no longer trust anyone, an occupational disease. I expend myself so totally to install these shows, they're like my kids, not quite that extreme, they're like baby goats I'm feeding with a bottle. Delicate. And I fear the ways outrageous fortune might collapse a house of cards. Or boxes. The museum smells of cardboard, not a bad smell at all, a kind of woody chypre, with overtones of chocolate rose. A man could wear this. which I intend to, tomorrow. See if anyone says anything. Not that I'm approachable, or could be approached from any direction,  just to see what someone thinks. One last drink, a final cigaret, bug noises outside. Nothing makes sense, really. Sleep a few more hours, wake to a phone call from Mom, things fine in Florida, meaning no change. Faulkner said somewhere that he didn't believe in facts that much. Interesting how much the great South American writers got him. McCarthy in those wonderful early books. The Southern Gothic. Reread some today. I still want to write a Mississippi novel, but all the work I'd done on that was stolen, along with the 1000 single-spaced manuscript pages of the book about building this house, and that delightful interlude book (a non-fiction novella) "On Three" which only existed in a single copy. All because I kept my hard copy in a fire-proof box that looked like a safe. That and my computers keep getting fried out here in the boonies. The finger that was jabbed by the guitar string got infected, so I opened it back up and flushed everything with iodine, then ointment and a band-aid. Another bad habit, over which I have little control, when I get bug bites around my ankles, and only there, I scratch until I bleed. It's my one entry into the pain/pleasure thing. It feels so good, I can't stop. I don't feel like I'm tightly controlled, but I really don't know, what would I compare that with? I don't go to family reunions, or graduation reunions, or any reunions of any sort, it seems to me they're a waste of time. Usually I'd rather be alone unless the conversation was interesting. There are exceptions, of course; times you might be simply bored, or times when what you remembered wasn't exactly the past-ness that other people remembered. I never argue with anyone, unless they actually step on my toes.