I just found the oddest bruise on my thigh. It's all mottled... one of those polka-dotted ones -- a base of that aged blood-seep yellow-brown with red-pink dots. Almost like the dots you see on ostrich leather?
It is ostritch leather, right? The dotted kind of leather you see on cowboy boots some times.
I like it when ridiculous and ridiculously good keep switching places. If I catch myself catching it, it always makes me think of electrons not really being in orderly orbits at all.
But hopping back and forth, and really somewhere in between and there's not really a word for it.
But then not that either, and more like clouds of percentages all the way to the edges of the universe.
Some joke about going broad here.
Some joke about pieces of me moving through pieces of you, even if it is years from now.
So many years even that I'm dead and the information churns on.
Like -- and I mean the joke about the pieces, not the dead part -- that Donne poem where his blood mixes with his date's in a flea that's bitten them both, so -- you know -- they might as well fuck.
That John Donne. He had a way with words.
I have a way with memory and reality though -- and it's likely that it wasn't even Donne.
And I know he didn't say "fuck," though that poem is aching for an update.
And that update belongs in a scene in a play that maybe feels a bit like Rent.
And that scene itself, I guess would be echoing that "let's do it for our country" scene from Grease in the bomb shelter.
Was that Grease 2? The movie.
Michelle Pfieffer. Seeing visions of her she-thinks-he's-dead Australian hottie in white leather.
She's dressed as a season. Winter?I can almost see it.
And she's lost the thread of the song all the other girls are singing and she's staring off at the boy who isn't there.
San Francisco surely steeped into me quickly.
Somewhere Kevin Killian is waking up or heading to brunch and he feels a disturbance in the force.
And he's peering into the astral plane (because I'm pretty sure he can do that) and he's telepathing at me, "Jamie you're doing this all wrong."
"I mean, shit, who cares about Michelle Pfieffer."
If I could telepath back at him I'd apologize and then cover my tracks by asking him if Pfeiffer to Cameron Diaz to the Olssen Twins looked like someone working through drafts of something to him.
Does to me.
And then more of the not caring about these starlets.
But more with the telepathing, he could just read that off the surface of my brain.
And if I was lucky he'd drop some suggestions for dim sum places while he was in there.
Telepaths don't need Yelp.
And on good days, their friends don't need it either.
--
Ed note: Did this just come around to being dedicated to Chris Toll? I thought I was heading toward telling you about remembering the first lists I ever wrote... and how I realized this list thing that I talk about sometimes and chide myself for at others goes way farther back than I thought. Further? Farther? I'll write all that this week sometime.
Ed note 2: I haven't thought / read about Killian's work in ages (more than 10 years I bet), and I'm surely going to let a San Francisco bookstore help me with that today. I'm willing published copies of his celebrity plays into existence right now if they don't exist already somewhere. Listen up universe. I'm
willing.
