Lucca Brazzi Contemplates Mortality

[mallorys_camera]

This photograph almost works for me. I like the composition – the symmetry of the men's profiles, the twinned gestures. But I dunno. Something about the focus is off. Is it that their faces are turned the wrong way from the camera? Or maybe the color of the squid isn't vibrant enough. Does Annie Liebowitz Photoshop?

I continue in my putzy mood. I described the mood at great length to a friend yesterday, and he remarked, "Sounds generative to me. Like you're about to give birth to something." Which is why he's my friend!

Yesterday a perfect sentence came into my mind, something about how the purest expression of So-and-So's love was that he'd begun smoking his beloved's brand of cigarettes even though they gave him a terrible cough. I was driving at the time in heavy traffic, couldn't pull over to write it down.

It's almost time for my annual rejection at the hands of the Stegner Fellowship admissions committee, please to note.

Saturday Night In the Sky would work actually if I made the one, true Maximon mask the McGuffin, endowed it with special woo-woo, hoodoo power and merged Briskind and Hazzard into one central POV character, no longer a screenwriter but a journalist. It's topical, God knows. The Mayan End of the World scenario is coming up fast. Better make those reservations now!

Plus there's an entertaining Ten Little Indians-style mystery waiting to be written about Semana Negra. Dowdy little protagonist/heroine writes a mystery that unexpectedly becomes a bestseller. She's a nurse, she dreams up a detective who's dying from Hodgkin's Disease, occupying his time between bone marrow transplants by solving various hospital based murders – did you know that you can actually kill someone who's in kidney failure by feeding them enough orange juice? Mr. Rogers didn't think you did! Heroine gets invited to prestigious Spanish literary festival that no one in the US has ever heard of with a bunch of other authors, one of who dies mysteriously. Heroine channels her detective, goes from dowdy to doughty (yuk, yuk!), solves the mystery, finds true love and lives happily ever after.



Dreamed about J__B_____ last night, friend of my bosom, mainstay of my mental health during those last difficult days of my first marriage. In the dream, J__ told me he was gay. "Well, I kind of knew that," I said in the dream.

"I didn't know that," the dream J__ told me.

But I didn't really know it because when I woke up first I thought, "Huh," and only then, "Of course." And wondered whether J__ had drifted so downstream on the river of time that it really would be impossible to find him again.