gratitude for my life

I stayed up until almost dawn last night, looking around for ways to remember the name of that astonishingly versatile supermodel whose image with a cigarette I would so like to own. I had to go through all manner of bullshit lists of sluts for "modeling" jobs and people's top ten lists for supermodels before it finally dawned on me to add the word "fashion" to my query. This yielded up, finally, a site where I could go down a list of about five hundred of them, mercifully confined to female supermodels, but unmercifully not in alphabetical order, which would have saved a long time because I could remember her initials, just not her name. Finally, I found her and could google around for images and news snippets and videos... to satisfy myself that she is still doing well at the the wizened old age of thirty-two.

Then I got in bed and started reading about Jules Kroll, who's a suspect, or whose company anyway is a suspect, in the minds of some 9/11 Truthers, but somehow I don't think they're going to get to that in this piece. I don't know yet because I finally fell asleep. I got up once to pee and make sure apocalypse had not set in yonder, take my "morning" pills, and flop back into bed. So while you were probably starting your Thanksgiving feast, I was dreaming of Thanksgiving dinner with my family.

I was seated next to my uncle, who was making some offhand bit of sophistry about my father being locked up in the memory ward with a bunch of completely gone old ladies, as though it was indeed tough, but it was better this way. It is not better this way. My father still knows who he is and who we are and that he's locked up with dotty strangers in a nightmare of determined care-giving, virtually no avenue of free will left to him. It's barbaric. No excuses. So I stood up from the table and left to go find my father.

It was pretty late, past visiting hours, but I felt they'd let me see him since I live so far away and this was my only chance to see him. I had a lot of trouble parking in any manner that could be considered adjacent to an entrance to a very strangely arranged confluence of buildings, where, as I understood it, they had moved him to the sixth floor, the top floor. I finally found a spot that seemed to be near the tallest part of this strange complex, that really wasn't one building, more like three or four that were all twisting around each other, connecting in counterintuitive ways.

In the lobby were all the administrators and nurses and orderlies... no old people. These were the people I had to ask in order to get to see Poppa. I said my piece to somebody who agreeably went off to secure permission for me, and found myself waiting at a break table with an orderly and a few shadowy others. The orderly was talking kindly to me and I was responding courteously to him. He was telling me that I'd have to change elevators on the fifth floor to get to the sixth because no elevator went straight to the sixth from the ground floor. This was irksome, but I could understand the problem, having seen the great mess of a place from outside. Except, all of a sudden he began talking to me as though I were world famous, this supermodel who channels something deeply true about me in certain images, and wanted to know how I could get along in this condition with my substance abuse problem....

Well, that was at least as outrageous as the crap that issued from my uncle earlier, so I did exactly as I had earlier: I got up from the table and left. Both departures were abrupt, but without any emotion, any hard edges, just immediately absenting myself from the delusory drivel that issues from sentient beings by way of attempting feats with thin air such as blurring their guilt and shame for heartlessness, placing themselves on some sort of ladder in relation to you... even when it's merely projecting that's what you're trying to do to them... that sort of thing. Just asinine. Just evil. I have no time for it.

So I was off on another odyssey of hallways and elevators, shooting the maze of relativity, to find my father and hug him and thank him and tell him everything, "show him my soul"... be his family with him forever.

I made it to the fifth floor. The halls were very narrow and there were dotty white-haired women speaking gibberish in almost every doorway, and obviously none could direct me to the elevator that would take me to the sixth floor. I got back in the elevator I'd just taken to make sure it didn't really somehow go the rest of the way, and it really didn't. So I got back out to start roaming those narrow hallways echoing with gibberish to find the way up to finally convey completely what I've been trying to get across for my entire life....

And that's where the dream ended.