Cheer and the Mirror in the Lake

Lately I’m in fast forward. Not twitchy, but I run everywhere. I almost took out a young brunette patient on my way to get my lunch earlier, clipping doctors all the way. Also lately, I’m totally cracking myself up, particularly in the car as I’m driving home, conjuring jokes and laughing out loud, wishing I had someone to share them with, feeling quickly and momentarily lonely. (Why are these walls padded?) It’s a phenomenon weird to me. (And, hey, why am I chained to the floor?) During a poetry workshop at Iowa, I was asked to read a couple of poems I had turned in for the worksheet, which we didn’t have time to discuss. It was a pair of related poems, both which came to me while I was lying on my bed one Sunday afternoon. I had just shut my eyes to nap, and then these two short poems surfaced. I don’t know where they came from but I found them crazily funny. When I began to read them in class, my voice quivered in my attempt to hold back my laughter. How narcissistic I would seem! But the inevitable smile broke onto my face and luckily some people in the class laughed so my own laughter could be less noticeable. Since I don’t claim authorship, it isn’t really narcissistic, but how could I have fully and convincingly conveyed that in the lone second I could have stuffed it into between reading the poems and laughing at the poems? Impossible. Anyway, here’s to cheer.

I doubt that when I die I will be flown in my casket first to Cairo for my funeral and then to West Bank for my burial. Oh well. I still hold to my enduring dream of ideal death: to run fast off the edge of a cliff and, after freefalling for long enough to be fun, disappear into the air. Which would make the casket unnecessary altogether. What is right for Yasser Arafat isn’t necessarily right for me.

Tunes for today:
Mojave 3--ask me tomorrow
Stereolab--Aluminum Tunes (disc 1)