If only you believed.

The older you get the the less a day off is a day off.  It becomes an auxiliary, all unfinished business is stuffed in square-peg-in-round-hole style til counter-intuitively the day off contains more work than the work day.  I use mushrooms to get by.

But lets let that wait for now.  This morning began innocently enough with one of my recent favorite distractions, playing songs on Blip.com.  I'm sure it's making someone money, but every now and then I get "props" from a pretty woman with good taste in music and it keeps me another inch from the edge.  Fuckin A.  

So sometime later I walked Ella over to the laundromat for some long overdue washing.  When I say--or evince in pure spirit as is so often and disorientingly my m.o., that this will be the summer of hallucinogenics and the pursuit of happiness I should, again both literally and in pure spirit as evinced, add that I have also taken an unexpected interest in cleanliness.  As my days at the Goose are numbered--soon I will be but another lay person crashed out on the right side of the bar, I have found a new affinity for clean skin, clean hair,  and sartorial trapping free of burnt zucchini's unmistakable aroma.  Got me a haircut, a few items of personal hygiene, and have every intention of getting some new clothes before the tax return money is spent.  No rivulets of salty beer sweat here, just crazy trippy shit happening in my head all day and night.  Doctors will trace a catatonic burn-out condition back to this precise moment.  When we imagine the purpose of writing do we ever really anticipate it as having evidentiary impact?  Isn't the notion that it could come of anything similar to the notion of death, it's been proven time and again, but the prospect of it happening to ones self is, though not unrealistic, a tab bit hard to picture.  Someday this writing will explain a catatonic state.  There.

So I was at the laundromat with Ella, when a not unattractive woman approached me to pet the dog.  It was not long before she told me all about her dogs, the accumulation of pet hair on the rugs and empty nest syndrome.  She was really good natured and Ella liked her.  Now I don't know if it's because I was still drunk from the last night or whether she was communicating strangely (kind of like the Orson Welles movie, The Lady from Shanghai, which for a number of reasons, both technical and performative, involving the sound track of the movie I have no idea what it's about beyond the things a compromising man would do for Rita Hayworth).  Whatever the chemistry, I ended up slightly puzzled by her, and in short turn found myself trying to play catch-up with her meaning.   She raised terms like "task bartering", "child bartering", and "hang it on so and so".  It developed into one of those Double Indemnity scenarios.  If I'd have leaned into her and asked, "You want me to kill your husband, right?", she'd have--still petting the dog with a puckered baby play face mind you, have rebuffed me with, "Not here, we can't discuss it here."

 I don't like speaking ill of exhilaration, but the truth of it was that the Jefferson Starship song "Miracles" was playing on the radio in the laundromat as all this was happening and I just figured the prevailing air of confusion was a small price to pay to hear a song I'd always loved, the album of which I would likely never buy.  We pay.  One way or the other we pay for what we take.

I walked Ella home with the peculiar memory of the woman who wanted me to kill her husband ebbing as a more distant one quickly emerged.  This too involved "Miracles" and the presidential election of 1984.  I was nine, and the song was on the radio.  I got up before everyone else, and ate cereal by the radio.  I had just seen Walter Mondale on tv.  I have no idea, apart from the unbiased sequencing of long-term memory, why I link these events, or even why my imagination chose to fight so strongly to keep intact two banalities equally well-served apart.  But really, is what I don't know now so much worse than what I didn't know before conceding to this?  I am, above all things, striving for inner peace, and the shadow of doubt must find its bay.

Earlier, maybe an hour or so.  It was a Saturday and I had the tv room to myself, waiting for cartoons.  At that hour only the odious Christian-themed cartoons ran, and even then I found them unpalatable and hated the shoddy manner in which they attempted to disguise their moral monochromaticism with such bland characters and shitty artwork.  So I watched an informercial with Walter Mondale, he was discussing America's problems, the poor and such, basically making his case for the presidency.  I liked him.  He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would push you around.  Reagan always struck me as the kind of guy who would--like the kid at school to whom everyone was nice, but only because he was a violent asshole whose self-amusing wrath you'd just as soon avoid.  My dad was awake. "Miracles" was on the radio and summer as I first knew it permeated the absorbency of my alert life.  I thought this has to be a woman singing, but a woman who sounds like a man.  I always thought Carly Simon sounded like a man, too.  Like in a vacuum I could picture Carly Simon as a  dude.  It amused me from a young age to find that not only was Carly Simon a woman but thought of as something of a sex symbol.   Sometimes when flipping through records at a store I'll see cover art depicting an attractive but forgotten singer.  Julie London comes to mind, but I know there are better, more recent examples, just none I can think of off the bat.  I think:  it's instantly clear from this moment in time why this person got a record deal and why it didn't work out.  I wondered to my Dad why he didn't support Mondale instead of Reagan.  After all, my Dad hated douchebags and bullies as much as anyone.  His response is unprintable.  

A palindromic current of conservativism originated that would change courses in a feeling of being had just before my college years.  I still get a laugh though when I pass a record by Carly Simon in a record store.  Whatever dude.