The Hours are upon me

These are the hands of Philip Glass himself. Looks like he’s done some boxing too. Ineffable.

Into my fourth day with no real sleep. Love my wife and hate her at the same time. Women can’t do both at the same time. They cycle. So she hates me, loves me, hates me, etc. If Catullus had been Catulla instead, the poem would have been called “Odi, Amo, Odi, Amo”, which actually sounds like a Piaf title come to think of it. Still. Exhausting to live through. But I love her. Just that I am running down love-wise generally except when I’m not, because of Current Events. Used to be a children’s magazine called Highlights for Children, where they had a page named Current Events. But they left out the most important Current Event: People suck. Maybe you have to be older, or just plain old, to get that part of the story into the disbelieving head everyone is anxious to describe as ‘failing.’ Be that as it may, People suck. Life sucks.

Max died. Elliott died. Sidney died. And now Eloise has died. All within the last month or two. What you get when you’re in the business of rescuing seniors. Except when Elliott and Eloise weren’t seniors. They jumped on the wagon whose hours are now counting down. Hours. Ours.

My wife gets it that I’m dying because my country is dying and I am dying with it. She gets it, then she doesn’t, then she does… You know.

The Hours. It’s a death knell, it’s an indomitable heartbeat, both at once. Why women don’t get it. They don’t like this piece much. You can’t be both death and indomitable. But you can. I swear off writing every day, then I redouble my efforts and write again for, you know, hours. I am told I’ve lost my sense of humor, but I am the last man satirizing the end of civilization with content that’s still funny and not in a bad way but a simply funny way. And a mean way, a lost way, a despairing way. But funny. Women don’t like that shit.

I actually have all the pieces. Not kidding. When the brick came through the window I caught the falling shards and I hold them in my bleeding hands right now. There is some new kind of writing that comes from the shards rearranged, and I am very old but seeking, still believing I can do it. 

Not like the others. I haven’t written exactly the same thing over and over again. Why my shards are less like Picasso, Warhol, Schoenberg, Chagall, or Hemingway but jagged fragments of all of them jangling noisily in a burlap bag, singing a new godawful song together. It’s not a pretty song. It screeches. It roams across a landscape of dead eyes, doomed souls, and empty hearts that are the children the abortionists are so anxious to abort. You see, I know the real Roe issue. Roe is a death wish. The 50 percent who are on the fence about Roe should hop off. It’s gonna bite you in the sweetbreads, whatever gender you think you are.

I know what the Roesters are thinking because I have that death wish too. But I also don’t. Unlike women, I don’t cycle. I am simultaneous, concurrent. I am a heartbeat and a death drum sounding in rhythm. Now hear my heart. It beats differently in each of these incantational performances.

Bare Bones. Just the man and the keyboard.

Now much more. I wrote a long post back 

in the day about why this was the greatest 

music video of all time. I was almost right.

Now we’ve got it all going. It’s Philip Glass and Edward 

Hopper, Dali, Truffaut, Audrey Hepburn, Kafka, William

Burroughs, Stanley Kubrick, and the End of Everything.

But all it really is, seriously, is a prodigy at the piano and in his rooms writing down a score. We’ll remember this man when all the dead men currently in charge are just Wikipedia graves. Promise.

.

Maybe it’s not THE greatest music video of all time. Prince and 

Bowie are rattling in my old closet somewhere, but truthfully,

 this is MY favorite music video of all time, or of this moment

at least, given that it’s May 2022. An old genius playing his 

own masterpiece on a piano while we get to watch and listen.

Odi et Amo. What women cannot do. To save theirs or anyone else’s lives.

Just telling you. I write beautifully because I do it so easily. I’m not even afraid to tell you how good I am. I’ve done send-ups of Updike (overwriter Harvard Summa, CREEPY), Cheever (overachiever Thayer Academy dropout, TURGID), Mailer (LOOK AT ME!), and they were the gold standard before the classless lowboys hit the scene, meaning William Burroughs and Philip Roth. Neither one of whom could actually write. I aspired to write a story as good as ‘Babylon Revisited,’ and I think I got there eventually through a couple back doors, but nobody else even seems to be trying to be a real writer. I know you think you might be kinda sorta like me, somehow. You’re not. I AM a writer. Try ever doing this on your smartphone.

For which I am sad as hell.