Isolated Madness

Not so much that craziness, an act of, is separate from the great ebb and flow. Everything is pretty nuts. It's gotten to where you can't trust what you see. I don't have a TV and I don't have a cell phone, fuck, I don't have running water, so I claim a certain disposition. The Idiot Clause. Which I learned from recent presidents. You just disavow that you knew anything. Once you catch on to being stupid, it gets easier, eventually you can be as dumb as anyone else. Clearly I'm disturbed by something, I couldn't say what it was, directly, I don't even know. I only know that I'm pissed and that it bleeds into my operating systems, corrupts files, makes false claims. Very nice visit at the Social Security Administration, only had to wait for one person and then the guy there was nice, helpful, and amazed to meet someone who loved their job. Seems I can start drawing checks after the first of the year with no penalty against what I earn at the museum. Good news, as I means I can afford to get a truck that'll get me to Florida, and upgrade this old Dell which is certainly on its last legs. Nearly half of my gross income for 13 years in child support payments, and I've been broke that entire time; now I can finally get some new underwear and socks. Exciting prospects. Treat myself to a day a month at a motel, so I could shower and watch a movie on TV, sleep between clean sheets. For reasons unknown, I usually sleep on top of the bedclothes, which include a quilt and a down comforter (harkens back to the feather-bed) with just an old army blanket. In winter I wear more clothes to bed. Sometimes it's pretty funny, the outfits I come up with. You live by yourself, and it doesn't matter so much, what you look like around the house. Sometimes even when you go out in public; last week, when I was doing the laundry, I was wearing a paint-spattered pair of Dockers, with an actual frayed piece of rope as a belt. I wear jeans most of the time, and I have a wide leather belt I wear with them; it doesn't fit Dockers; and I used to have a narrow belt, I used in these situations, but it died, somehow, and I didn't have a way to hold my pants up, found a piece of rope and tied a perfect square knot: a handsome solution. I thought I looked good, you know? It was somewhere in Utah, I can tell from the light, late afternoon, mid-summer, an old photograph of me scrambling on some scree. Hey. Pot calling the kettle black. It seems pretty obscure, I know, but if I ever admitted anything, I'd invite a flow. Just as happy things present themselves. Babies and such. Old photographs. Life, such as it is, not as it was imagined. I don't mean that in a negative way. When I look around, the tottering piles of books, an accumulation of trilobites, dust bunnies, it feels alright. What single thing could have been otherwise? How would that have changed anything? You can play that game forever. After work I go for a draft and one of those hot pretzels at the pub with TR. We talk about phrase and measure. To be very precise with Emily, musically, what you'd want to do is establish the dash, something with the violin, a note that might be drawn out. Mac, of course, would be a great voice-over. I like her, fiddling with papers, then a minute of pure music, then her responding to that. Just imagining. There is no truth to the rumor that I was a cheerleader in 1964; I could have been, but I got cold feet. Would it look OK on my resume? Fuck a bunch of small town crap, I don't have time for it. I was thinking about something, what was it? I can't remember.