Fifty years old plus three days. So what am I supposed to do? People talk to me about how I'm supposed to have a new life, when everyone around me has been living theirs. People with children tell me how to live a life when I can't ever have any children at all. People who want to get away from their parents, and sell all they have, and buy their heart's desire from some mall, when I'd really have what I grew up with, instead of some "modern design" from IKEA or the Internet. They talk about Stuart Little and Beatrix Potter, when I lived with First Editions of both of them, but can't read them, the paper and the binding of them, because someone has decided I can't have them.
Instead, they give me pictures. Wonderful pictures, of my mother, and her mother, and all the people who've died. These are supposed to console me. Hello, Mom. Hello, Mayme. Hello, Aunt Ethel and Grampy George. I don't know who these people are in a yearbook are: they went to school with Mom, and I'm supposed to like having them, instead of Little Pictures of Japan, the Bookhouse book from which I learned to read. Neat. All those books I collected as a teenager are supposed to be dear to my heart, right? Much, much more than that Golden Book of Chemistry...oh, yes, I'd much rather have an (expurgated) Sherlock Holmes than that piece of trash, can I say NOT?...Because, it's well, so beyond me that any of these things would ever have any value to people who would buy Well...they have their reward in the Hereafter...
First black & white bouquet of the season. Had to cut the black part (dock plants) off with a knife. (Hunter Thompson speaking?) It's the zero Summer. I listen to Fronteira, to Joni Mitchell, and to all the great female voices of the Seventies, whether they be female or even Seventies: Todd Rundgren, Sade Adu...they're still on the list...While I read Nova, and the Baroque Cycle, and contemplate the next move..