Ah Me

Dear K,

I have been absent. I have done nothing. Well that's not true. I have written so much more in my novel. I have said hello and farewell to long distant friends. I have filled my days with clouds and smoke and drink and songs and poems and endless solitude.

I am comfortable in my solitude. I wear it well. My solitude is a comfortable suit. Neither too thin or thick. It breaths in summer and holds close in winter. Perhaps I wear it so well because I am loved by so many, and by many not in the way that I would chose. But as you well know nobody can chose who and how they love.

I think a large answer to my problems is that I need to publish some of my work. Some of my short stories, not the ones in that terrible little green book, are ripe for publishing. I merely need to blow some dust off of them and send them in, and then in my fantasies I bask in adulation. A career is launched, where I spend my days riding a bicycle up and down the banks of the Mississippi River, gathering stories.

Today I heard a story about a friends mother. She was wild in her youth, and would steal away in the middle of the night to smoke cigarettes. She and her girlfriends would go to the roofs of tall buildings and spit off them. Once on ludicrous youthful excursion this woman, then a girl, snuck onto a neighbors farm and grabbed a watermelon. The farmer shot a round of buckshot at her, shattering the melon, and forever embedding a small piece of metal in her face. The buckshot remains there to this day, I'm told at the top of her cheek, just below her right eye, and you can poke at it, and she will laugh and tell you other stories about dark summer nights.


I hope all is well.

We should perhaps talk on the phone soon.

Regards,
K