Everybody Loves a Puppy

I have been staying up too late working on pictures and writing emails.  I must quit it.  I am acting like a teenager.  How do they do it?  None of them ever sleep, I am told.  They run on lunar energy.  Lunar powered.  And we know where that leads.  I must avoid becoming more of a lunatic than I am.  I will leave that to the children.  They have vast reserves and much to squander.  The little I have left I must husband away.

I say that with fear and trembling.  Red is coming on Friday, and she has a different power source than I.  Jesus.  I am like the wiring in my house, old and frayed.  I must disconnect soon.  I will turn everything off and go away.  It is time.  I  have been asking people who know about Montauk and the Hudson Valley to give me info.  I am thinking a few days in each would do me good.  Then California in July.  San Francisco is a gateway city, though, with its brothels and opium dens.  I must make certain while I am there to only venture forth in daylight.  Nothing good ever happens a) after midnight and/or b) on a dirt road.  At least there are no dirt roads in San Francisco.  I will tell Red I've just discovered I have a medical condition and must be in bed early.  Once so long ago, when P.G. was trying to kill me, I told her to think of me as an hors d'oeurve.  She could come to my house, have dinner and wine and strange and beautiful music and still be downtown by eleven.  It was ideal, I thought, but she complained that I fell asleep before movies would end and that she had to watch the last hour all by herself.  I snored and smelled of scotch she may have added.  I never told her, perhaps, how good it all made me feel having someone watching over me.  The break came when I showed her "Manhattan."  We watched it differently, she and I.  I thought it poignantly and painfully romantic.  She thought I was calling her a little girl.  


In my life, though, I have never thought of youth as anything but advantageous.  It is brilliant and bold and glitters in the dark.  Youth knows or will know everything.  There is nothing that competes with it.  It is the thing we all desire.  


I mean really. . . everybody loves a puppy.  Four out of five doctors and psychologists insist they are good for us, that they bring us health and make us live longer.  


Maybe so.  But I need some sleep.  Tonight I will listen to the fifth.