(lovely a girl as there ever was)
To give you an idea of how sad my life is right now..... I came home from work tonight and tried to jog a mile. I've gotten so fat that my back hurt from the start, so I couldn't quite finish. My back gave out only shortly before my lungs and legs did. I had thought enough of my pain in advance to bring beer money with me jogging. I stopped at the corner deli. My friends there, surprised that I was wet with sweat, asked if everything was ok. I waved my hand, breathless, that all was fine... etc. This is normal.
(I have been in immense back pain lately, though oddly it does not seem to bother me to jog, or to ride a bike, or walk... I know this seems unlikely, but bear with me here.... it is a different part of my back/leg that hurts tremendously. The part that hurts from jogging is moderately manageable with normal life-dullers like beer. The other pain-part is eternal and from the center of iniquity, the evil of unknown distant stars. I have begged and cursed everyone for morphine to relieve the pain, but nobody in my miniature shrinking universe has any sympathy for me, or power.... more on that later....)
So, I come home from work... In solitude. The very thing that I had thought that I had wanted for so long. Nope. I must be out of my mind. I didn't really want solitude. I only wanted Rachel to leave me alone for a few minutes each night, but to always be there to leave me alone, etc. I am so fucked up I don't know what I want. Except that I very much do want morphine.
Solitude is fucking horrendous, it is for idiots and assholes and other idiots. I can't read, I can't write, I cant sleep, I don't want to shower. I haunt the house that I live in. I have eaten mostly philly-cheesesteaks for three days straight. Even my clean clothes smell funny and don't look right in the daylight. Though they are folded and stacked, they look weird, off.
Daylight looks yellow, not golden, just yellow. It is too hot.
So, let me get back to the point: I have been listening to Led Zeppelin, and lots of it. When I say lots, I mean LOTS. When I was much younger I was your standard Led Zeppelin pot-head fuck-brained fanatic. I eagerly overlooked all of The Hobbit bullshit, and the dopey myth about satan cults, and hotel eels. I loved the mysterious dark power to their music, to their production, to the very idea that cool stupid people could easily outgrasp the very uncool smart people that I knew.
It was primal, you see. Hey, hey what can I do...?
Anyway, I'm trying to give you insight into my life at home now. My studio speakers have been shipped out by migrant hobos on a midnight train to places unknown, so I can't even reasonably break any laws with the speakers on my computer, but I try and try. I come home, sort-of-jog, return defeated, drink some cold beer, jam some LED FUCKIGN ZEPPELIN, MAN... as loud as it will go on an iMac's built-in speaker, kick my feet up as high as they'll go, and start texting my pregnant wife.
Such is the tremendous sweep of my danger...... I am my own doppeldanger. God-dang it, man.
I have a much damaged lower spine, a bone that is the shape of a boxer's nose growing out of the heel of my right foot, I'm 42, currently living alone, listening to Zep, late at night, drinking beer, Coors, in fact... By any societal standards I should probably be quarantined. I'm about to give somebody rabies.
My wife laughs along with all of it. She thinks it is a great joke. She remembers the dangerous years....
I probably shouldn't be writing this: Once when her and I were still playfully/sexually toppling towards real love.... I had fallen under some new misery of the misfortune of aging. She was standing at the foot of the bed, luminous, barely dressed in some iridescent cotton-fuck-tissue, scent from heavens... I likely had a pillow under my knees to elevate the throbbing ailment. But she stood there and looked both good and great and fresh and redeeming and fertile and wonderfully innocently pornographic, but also just nude enough to be scenic, floating above me, lovely a girl as there ever was.... We were drinking wine, of course, talking in the open ways of comfort and ease, as lovers, with the ease of lovers, each of us quite pleased, charmed magnets, suddenly on the verge of recapturing the sense of seduction that grants it all, that makes it all, holds it all, the force that binds togethers.... the force from which there is no turning, sense and sensuality, unexpected suction and then action and undertow, some visions, some darkness, some light, and then the sudden warm underwater joy of flight.
She looked at me, asked if I would be okay ? If I was sure that I was, up for it...
I stared back at her thin body, her glowing delicious smiling eyes... and her lips, so soon to be had, and held out my hand there for her...
"Get over here and break my hip..."
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