But Saturday night I indulged myself with a large and somewhat luxurious meal. I don't do that often, but I have no idea if I'll ever get to do it again. Eat, drink, and be merry, as the saying goes. At least I've gotten the first two down. Merriment is a bit more difficult. Still, the meal turned out good, despite my limited cooking skills, and I am properly stuffed (there's another joke lurking there, but I'm not going to make it. Nor that one either.) How foolish this all seems (and me with an income (reference there to Raymond Queneau's Zazie, perhaps amusing to those familiar with the work, probably incomprehensible and maybe stupid to everyone else. I don't particularly care anymore.))
That mockingbird has been unaccountably generous with song to me for the last couple of days. Maybe it knows something I don't. There are one hell of a lot of things I don't know, and so the odds are good, even when I'm talking about a bird. Birds are probably smarter than we imagine anyway. There's a grim (one of very many) passage somewhere in the Bible about the birds being called to "the great evening feast of God" during which they devour the cadavers of the countless humans destroyed in the apocalypse. "And dung shall cover the Earth" the story continues. Who writes this shit? (Another pun. Well I'll be damned.) Some Englishman (I can't recall which one, but it was one who nobody, as far as I know, has claimed was channeling the word of God) said that nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning. For me, at least, the prospect of suffocating to death in a few weeks because of something that can't be seen without a microscope seems to have the opposite effect.
I have no idea why I'm being so negative and pessimistic tonight, especially considering that I'm so well fed at the moment. Perhaps it's just my consciousness of that "moment" part. Moments never last long, and the likelihood of worse ones coming always shadow the best of them, even in the best of times. These are not the best of times, but they are the times we've got. Maybe I just need to drink some more. Maybe I just needed to drink a bit less. Maybe if someone credibly threatened to have me hanged in the morning I could figure out which one it is. But I doubt it. Well, I ought to be asleep fairly soon, and then I won't care, or if I care I won't be consciously aware of it. Nothing makes much sense anymore, and I'm coming to doubt that it ever really did. I'm going to go eat some chocolate. Who needs things to make sense when they have chocolate to make things sensual?
Sunday Verse
The Secret
by Denise Levertov
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all