Lately, I have been trying to take it easy. I sit on my couch and it is dirty. A jerk lived on my couch for a while and made the cushions very fucked up and burned by cigarettes. I sit on my couch and listen to slim slinky guitar jazz. Sometimes, I read a book called The Abortion by Richard Brautigan. It is very good. It is very funny and inventive. It is about a librarian who can never leave the library. Fortunately for him, he has a perfectly proportioned girlfriend.
I go to the kitchen and make a salad. It has greens, lots of greens. I am trying to eat good things. I keep getting sick, and I believe it is because my body is feeling down because I don’t feed it good things. My soul is also damaged because I don’t feed it good spiritual things. It needs a clean house and a god to pray to. I need always nice, never drunk, friends. So the salad has all sorts of leafy greens in it and cucumbers, too. Then onions, Gorgonzola cheese and walnuts. I make it in a big white bowl that I used to use for popcorn when I lived with my last roommate.
I go to the couch and shake a little bit. I think I might have fever. I can barely speak because my words just sound like squeaks once they get past my lips. No one can understand me because I sound so funny.
On the couch, the jazz is still slinking and the octopus lights are hanging above the armchair that I bought from a woman named Gillian. I think she almost killed me when I didn’t pay her for the chair right away. The lights and the chair together are a very pretty picture. I have taken many photographs of them together. I also find it soothing, especially when there is slinky jazz on.
I think about my friend who went home to have surgery. They performed surgery on her cervix. When I was on the phone with her I mistakably asked her how her clit was feeling. I was not coming on to her. They were extracting irregular cell growths. It was a good thing they took them out because they could have eventually become cancerous cells. I once had bones extracted from my feet because I was born with an extra one in each foot. So, I sort-of know how she feels.
I pull my sweater and t-shirt over my head, turning myself into a monster or zombie to any honest passerby. No one is passing by because I am alone in my living room. I am in my shirt and stare at my belly that is getting fatter because I have just been eating at the terrible Midwest pizza joints and at the good Mexican place down the road. Faith tells me I am fat, but she is just kidding. I wouldn’t mind looking like Will Oldham in his movie Old Joy. He is fat and bearded and very lovable, like a big fuzzy, folk-singin’ teddy bear. I wouldn’t mind being that someday. I feel warm and like a sock inside my shirts but I take my head out to try and eat my salad.
I have put too much dressing on my salad and it splashes all over my face and on my sweater. I don’t do anything about it. This is partly because I am preoccupied with something else. Something bigger. I eat as much as possible, trying to dredge up the good walnuts and Gorgonzola cheese from the bottom of the bowl. It is very difficult. I succeed in the end and eat the whole thing.
I am very nervous. I want my mother. I am sick and feel like a child.
(jc)
