the sublimity of his thought just really, really does it for me

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His imprecision actually enhances it... the way he can clarify without the stiffness that renders it null. This helps me so much when the world makes me this sore.

In keeping with my recent return to something approximating my former lucidity, I betook myself to the pharmacy and the health food store earlier, to show I was capable of picking up a prescription with no irked reminder robocalls, and to implore the owner of the health food store to stock my berry essence Cascade Ice sparkling water so the fucker up in Brookings who keeps beating me to the stock at Fred Meyer can just have his fucking hegemony all to his own greedy-ass self. I'm going to look into getting cases of it delivered too. It rocks. No calories, no sodium, certified organic, bubbly and outright delicious... worth the recycling effort a thousand times over. And I decided to leave the Buddha Machine playing at my desk while I was out so my home would be in a state of peace when I returned. I did these things.

I did them dressed in a pair of Calvins I finally remembered having bought for a dollar off a rack in front of the secondhand store a year or so ago. I'd been deceived by the number "31" on them, thinking that meant plenty of room for my astoundingly widening pulchritude. It turned out to have been the inseam length and I couldn't get these pants up over my calves, let alone over my butt and zipped when I'd gotten them home to put on. I'm in them now and my new gray Emus and other manifestations of country schlub chic, the kind of stuff that drives the loggers wild with lust, and in which esthetic I am perfectly comfortable. In this state I drove through the rain and stood in line while one clerk agonized over the vexing insurance card of a woman who could only speak Spanish, and another clerk assembled a brand new fancy rolling and sitting walker for a little old lady who was goddam chic as me and practically twice my age. You should have seen her glorious sneakers! Codgers and Hispanics and clerks' vented mild epithets of professional frustration abounding, eventually I reached the counter in a state of complete equanimity and was quickly released from that bastion of capitalism that makes itself available to all of us who can't live in the Town of Perfect. Still perfectly comfortable in form and in execution, I proceeded to the health food store, where my inability to tell that the clerk was 74 inspired her to write a very clear note to the owner to see to it they start stocking my sparkling water. Back in my car, almost smiling from satisfaction, I applied the faintest hint of Burt's Bees lip shimmer to each cheek, just for an extra perky air, and drove off.

I had not gone a block when it struck me that I was entirely too damn hungry. That's when I remembered starting to prepare a cup of coffee to go -- to keep down hunger -- before leaving the house. That's when it struck me that I had no idea at which stage of this preparation I had blithely headed out my door. I remembered only putting the grounds in the filter and turning on the burner to boil the water. That's when my right foot started getting twitchy and leaden. I could not remember hearing that pot whistle before I got out the door... a crucial point of recall in this situation. That's when the loss of zen was very close to creating a wreck inside my car akin to the wreck that may have awaited me here.

But no. I blew off the hysteria trying to mount and made an orderly and thorough inventory of my brain.

And, I'll be damned, but I managed to pull up the needed data. For the first time in years. For the first time in years I could concentrate my way back through my lifelong absentmindedness to discern if the fire department should be called, or if I could just shake my head at the thermos mug of fresh coffee going cold under the filter I had not waited to let finish filtering before I left. I'm sipping on it now, an object of lust to loggers secreted in their rustic ruins and near wood burning stoves, sipping lukewarm appetite suppression, listening to the wash of the Buddha Machine, floating in the grace delivered by a maniac leftist professor with nervous ticks and a manly command of his own urgency even where his interlocutors don't deserve it.

See? That's the thing! For my whole life I've been a lot more like the stories of Einstein than like the babetude that has plagued me and elevated me and found me the maximum amount of trouble to ever get in! Only, I'm a girl. I'm renown in some circles as a "man-hearted woman", a "good driver, for a girl", a flipping walking castration ethic, and whenever anyone wants to remind someone who I am, all they have to say is, "You know, the one with the big tits, freckles and long hair," and I spring right back to mind. I'm not any of those things, even though some would say all, and I was raised by The Tooth Fairy, the good Fifties mother who never draws her bead off what is appropriate. I had no idea I had anything special going for me and could not conceive of protecting myself from the mean thickness of people around me. Who could conceive of such a thing!?! My essence is love. What could induce me to block the world from my essence? So I concentrated on things my own way, and no matter how much pain that involved.

My brain goes to the world that interests me, the one where possibility still gasps for breath, where positive manifestation is not dead, foreclosed, naïve. That leaves things done as a matter of course, mundane things, carrying on in an unlit sector of my brain. I would be in my office, furiously dictating some seven-thousand-page memorandum and having badly to pee but not knowing it until the urge was nearly beyond carrying me to the Ladies' Room. Still, it would propel me up from my chair and I would find then I didn't know why I was leaving my office, sit back down until the blast from the bladder screamed again for relief. Sometimes this would happen three or five times in a row until I finally fought back by announcing loudly enough for everyone in the outer office to hear that I had to pee worse than I had to go on living. My secretary's stock response was, "I'll alert the media," and she would carry on transcribing my seven-thousand-page memos.

You have no idea how artistic I have to be about my daily pill regimen to have any hope of identifying whether or not I have taken them... even just as soon as one minute after I have taken them.

I need a fucking personal manager... a dictator of the mundane even... someone I trust has the skinny on what's happening in consensual reality and wants my concentrating to bear its unique fruit as much as I do. It's not a subordinate position by any means. It's also damn entertaining for anyone secure enough in their own self-worth. But, ah, there's the rub now innit? That self-worth part. The sister of a very long ago lover of mine once exploded into a rant against my supposed conceit for continually praising myself aloud for such miracles as taking out the garbage on time. She did not grok that I did that sort of thing because something that stupid, trivial, ordinary, was almost literally beyond my ken. Her brother had to tune her up on this question. She was so involved in her feelings of competitiveness in her sexual identification gig that she so seriously was blind to the forest.

And, come to think of it, I wonder how many people in my life have any idea how much I still love them, how no amount of time or bullshit dims that here. People don't seem hip to this. They talk and act as though one puts down one's feelings and moves on. I never picked mine up. I never put mine down. I am them. You guys sound like such space aliens, or jackasses, when you talk that way. Too hard? Too bad. What is so is so and pretending it isn't doesn't fix it. It just fucks everything up even more.

Can't stand the pain? Quit trying to get a lid on it. It will definitely still hurt, but you won't be as stressed, as disabled. Same with every feeling. You have no control, no life, when you're so busy trying to fit it into the "acceptable", "appropriate", "normal", "healthy" zones. Grow into yourself. Live up to yourself. The world can't spare you any longer.