It’s not like I’m a complete neophyte when it comes to older women, but only now, with the gray very nearly on even terms with the brown has the intimidation waned instead of wanted.
I hate remembering this.
She motioned towards a photo. Her, apparently, almost obviously, several years back. I nearly blurted out what I was thinking, 'Wow. Is this you? You were gorgeous.'
But it’s a trap. Because if I say what I’m thinking, it means I’m implying that she's less so now.
She’s not, though.
Dawn still broke behind her eyes, as Dylan Thomas once wrote, of those remaining places where no sun shines.
So instead I said, “Who’s the goat sack?”
* * *
I’m getting better at hiding my alcohol addiction, though, in fact, the problem grows, the pace much faster, as Ogden Nash might quip, candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.
Sure, you don’t NEED alcohol, I said. But there are plenty of things with which you’re better off dead. Clothing and shelter and food, to name three. Indeed, too much of the second and you’ll live, die or flee.
* * *
We sing sin. We thin gin.
But we don’t hang with our wild doppelgang.
Turkeys and horses and pigs, dogs and cats and even figs,
Each with versions domestic and wild, wicked when old and precious when child.
But when you’re through singing songs of sin, let me in on the secret Gwen, how come there ain’t no feral hen?
* * *
Earlier in the day, I tried to find the Sheraton in town, and so I stopped and asked a little guy on the sidewalk for help, who told me,
"Pacific is the path to the Sheraton. Pacific leads to 15th, 15th leads to Broadway, Broadway (dramatic pause) leads to the Sheraton."
I think his name was Yoda.