...
I didn't get any phase four sleep last night and so all day I was an approximation of alert with that weird and very noticeably heavy core of thin air that rendered all ideas into not-as-good-as-a-nap. Nothing but the bare minimum got accomplished until, entirely too late, I just stripped and dropped.
Somehow I had the money to be staying in a hotel somewhere. I was in my room, writing very fervently between trips out to see things. I was wearing a headband across my eyes to keep the daylight out of my nap, but I was wearing that headband across my eyes under my glasses at the hotel. I kept noticing how odd it was that I could see fine without removing the headband, kept thinking I'd dispense with it, but never did.
I was listening to Duncan getting his tour manager's account of being stopped by a SWAT team on the street for taking a picture of a weird building, and typing in little notes for later additions to my mad composition. My sister and a couple of her friends were suddenly there and there was a need to find some little critter who'd gotten stuck somewhere and they weren't functioning toward addressing this problem.
I yelled the good plan and that we should get to it, and it met with zero response from any of them. So I returned to my typewriter to try to ignore them. One of them came to be patronizing toward me about their lack of response, like I might feel small about it, and I took her head off.
No, you jackass. You didn't respond because you were waiting for my cunt sister to take the lead, to make the first peep. Fuck the stuck critter you all pretend to love! That doesn't matter as much as the little political games to keep yourself safe from having to perform responsibly.
And then I bellowed out a litany of the ugly things my relative has given in return for my love, my absolute, and the patronizing ninny evaporated.
Then I was out on the town, pretty much lost, but finding good shortcuts through casinos and restaurants and theaters. I think demons were trying to make me afraid or bog me down, but I kept eluding their little tricks. A little French lesbian actress was trying to get me to go left around a building, a circus-themed restaurant — that was closed, so no shortcut through that one — and I did walk over there a few steps to look at what she was aiming for. It was swamp and a lake and she was out stepping gingerly around the boggiest spots, but I simply went back and got around the building from the right.
The city of gorgeous old brick buildings opened out in front of me. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful buildings and streets and alleys and seen perfectly clearly through the headband that was blotting out the daylight.
always and any time....
