Dependence Day

Woke with swollen glands and a sore throat.  I'm still on antibiotics, so I'm guessing I'm in trouble.  Throw all the plans for the day out the window.  I'm settling in.  Maybe someone could bring me some chicken soup.  Dependence Day.

I don't think so, though.  About the soup, I mean.  Attention no longer seems to linger.  Here.  It comes in waves and spurts.  It seems I may have too much going on one minute, then absolutely nothing the next.  I "dated" a woman for about six months some years ago.  She was the envy of everyone to look at, tall, thin, pretty.  She went to NYC, bought a condo in Brooklyn, had two children with her writer boyfriend.  Met a fashion model who was an old flame and things fell apart.  Left home, chased the girl across the country.  She writes me from time to time, tells me fragments of lurid tales.  Says she thinks about me.  Once when she was in town, she came to my house and drew hearts all over my windows and door with a marker.  Left lipstick kisses.  Didn't help my romantic situation at the time all that much.  Nice girl.  Hangs out with Mickey Rourke when she's in Manhattan.  Maybe I should have said that first.  Gives a better picture.

She just got out of jail.  Shoplifting.  She's decided to take to the rails with "Li'l Skanky"--I can't remember what she called him.  They are actually jumping trains.  First stop, she says, will be my own home town.  She will be dirty and plans to stay at my house, she says.  I think I'll check back in at the hospital.

My other life is with daughters of nice families, well-socialized, well-mannered.  I can only guess that they like the randomness of my behavior.  For a while.  It is a calm, predictable life then.  Dinners, functions, events.

And then the other thing, the roller coaster.

Some things make me long for the big silence.  And then it comes, and I get despondent.  I dial my phone and send emails to myself to see if the accounts are still active.  Sitting alone, I think, "Where oh where is my own true love?"

I shot with the woman in her home on Saturday.  The film is not ready yet.  It was dark in her house, so I'm not sure how the pictures will turn out.  The digital images are a little hard to work with, though.  We talked more than shot.  I tried not to "hold forth" and to let her tell her tale.  She is a contemporary girl with all that that entails.  New world.  New values.  She is bisexual, doesn't believe in monogamy.  Causes her trouble in relationships, she said.  She is young and beautiful, I told her.  It is easy not to believe in monogamy when all the faces turn toward you when you enter a room.  But I shouldn't have said that.  I should have stayed quiet, listened and learned.  Opining gets me nowhere.  It went well enough, though. We'll see.

A group of runners stream by my window now.  It is a 4th of July Road Race.  The first runners are all impossibly thin.  The next group are just thin.  Then come the athletic looking ones followed by people who look like me.  I quit looking after that.

The physical ailments are getting me down and confusing me.  It seems that real health has abandoned me.  I'll have to hunker down and wait.  It is all I can do.