Rights Reserved to Delete This

and of course other posts.

Life sometimes seems to consist in turning yourself inside out, and sticking to things. I might mean having your insides get stuck to things outside of you that you didn't necessarily intend; but I might just mean perseverance – prolly both.

I was in therapy for the better part of my adult life. My dad died just over a year ago. I'm still trying to make him love me. I've been writing an account of his death -- how I happened to visit him, 1,000 miles from my home, just in time to find him collapsed, naked, on his bathroom floor; how he died; etc. Every time I go back to what I've written, it sprouts like a hydra.

In the dark, I'm often sure about direction, less sure about distance. In life, I've usually grossly underestimated the distances.

When I was 7, I imagined heaven as involving a room full of watermelon, a room full of steak, a room full of french fries, and a room full of chocolate milkshakes.

When I was 12, I decided heaven could not possibly involve the physical, since it seemed to be the source of too much pain and difficulty. Without physical bodies, there would be no hunger, disease, racial discrimination or other judgments based on appearances, no insecurities about or over-compensations for height or weight. (I was highly ambivalent about my own body – I had zits, scant armpit hair, small boobs, small hips – while on the other hand, too many men, including my own dad, seemed nonetheless to take my personally-disappointing pubescence as sufficient cause to treat me like a whore).

Now, I think heaven should definitely involve french fries (thick yet crispy, with salt, ketchup, and sometimes vinegar), lots of sex, booze, drugs, and rock n' roll, and perhaps above all – what's the phrase – I guess there's no better term than art. Meaning, this time, intentionally aesthetic expressions in response to challenging exigencies.

Guess I'll need the physical world after all.