I don’t know how many of you are aware of this, but I’m a bit of a badass. Yes, I have a heart of gold and am a perfect precious angel whom everyone loves, but I also have no respect for authority and live by my own set of rules few could understand. The cops have never been able to catch me because I’m just too fast for them.

And so it was that yesterday I went to a beloved grocery store chain and saw these two gingerbread men who, having no alternative, were staring up and smiling happily upon me. I observed that one of them even had little stars for buttons. I felt a primal compulsion to take them both and so I did, plucking them from their tray with a little square of parchment paper. I then walked around the store with no intention of buying anything, all the while eating these two gingerbread men in full view of the public and the good Lord above. So brazen was my crime that I became immune to the fear of any mortal punishment.

Once satiated, I crumpled up the paper and tossed it in a trashcan. I cruised out of the store with the confidence of a man a hundred feet tall before suddenly realizing, with some dismay, that I now had the rest of my life to worry about again . . .

DAS ENDE.

i went on a walk in the cold and took a picture of the moon over the hospital where i was born . . .

i thought about how, almost exactly three months ago, which may as well have been a decade ago, i took a picture of that same moon over brooklyn for someone who soon became very special to me

(thanks for the pic nora)

So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based upon the principle of the circle within the circle. At the moment, I am in an inner circle. Of course, smaller circles within this circle are also possible.

“Oh, Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel,” Ignatius belched, “Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity.”

When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.

(a confederacy of dunces)

pretty sure i have accidentally tortured several girlfriends by blasting this in the car on loop (lol) . . . also my karaoke song

tbh i really did need a compliment from these angels today lol

ok . . . enough moping and complaining. no more sad posts. deleting the worst of them. for god’s sake, live! smile through the tears . . . everything is ok . . . really!

A WEEK OR SO AGO

. . . I went through the backend of my website and (childishly) nuked some posts from September and October and November because I felt hurt and I never wanted to look at them again.

However:

I WAS MISTAKEN

. . . it was a bad decision I had made rashly. So tonight

I RESTORED THEM

. . . because I felt sentimental . . . these people and places and things are, after all, part of The Tapestry of My Life (or whatever). And anyway, I don’t want them to go away. They live inside my head . . . they may as well live here too, which is just my head but on the internet.

I was also spurred on, perhaps accidentally on his part, by my good friend Tombo in Spain.

Earlier today Tombo had asked if he could call me:

. . . and when he finally did call, we had a three-hour long conversation about many things:

Most of my friends are women, and so I get a lot of very good advice from women. But sometimes you just need a dude to talk to about some stuff, and Tombo is always the best man for the job. He is like my friend Nora in that his advice to me will occupy a Neutral / Rational position. Listen: I always treasure it. Tonight his sage-like advice was particularly good. It made me feel much better about everything (for now??). There was even some of that much-needed Tombo optimism sprinkled in . . .

God help me, at one point I warned him that I was gonna get a little flowery talking about how I felt about something. He laughed and said, referencing MCCABE & MRS. MILLER: “You’ve got poetry in you.”

To which I of course replied:

By the time we finally hung up (it was 5 am in Madrid), I felt I had to restore those posts I had deleted, which I have just spent the last hour doing.

So yeah . . .

THE END!