2009: All Aboard
January 1, 2009 § 1 Comment
New Year’s Day, 2009. I’m slightly hungover—‘languid’ is the term I prefer—lying in bed in a dim room with my notebook, watching it get dark. Philip is out buying food and Charles is sunning himself in Florida. Charles complained over Christmas that his recent appearances in this blog were only related to a toilet plunger so I will let you know he crossed into 2009 in his red convertible, driving through the warm night with the top down, fireworks erupting all around him. Then he went to the beach, to a second party, and probably sent lots of love notes to his paramour. I would be jealous if I thought about it in any detail, but I don’t, and he’s not writing a blog. Yet. I used to read his diary when we were first together. He knew I was reading it and knew he didn’t have to worry because his handwriting was indecipherable. But I remember seeing my name a lot. It was satisfying and frustrating like being a dog while humans talk about you. There’s a beautiful view from this apartment, very old New York, which it makes me feel slightly less melancholy. The buildings are lit up, growing brighter as night falls. My mother’s house in Lompoc was the only one on her block not to have Christmas lights. “That’s how we’ll tell Whitney to find it,” I said. We found it by using Charles’ iphone. The route appears in blue and a blue blip moves with the car like a UFO in one of those stories that begin, “I was driving alone on a deserted country road…” Strange, how nobody gets abducted by UFO’s anymore. Perhaps that’s another achievement of the Reagan administration, something historians will uncover decades from now: our secret treaties with the aliens. They got to keep all the halfbreed babies and we didn’t nuke their home planet. OK, not very convincing. I’ll have a better story tomorrow. Lompoc’s a strange town. The shopping center where the grocery store is also houses a Payday Loan office and a discount cigarette store. My mother thought the town was upwardly mobile when she bought in but I think her real estate luck has run out. Why does 2009 sound like such a good year? It’s an elegant number. 2009 should be the year computers attain sentience and amaze us with their perspective on things, not ‘mechanical’, not hostile or psychotic, simply wonderfully peculiar. The new kid in town, the one from some country you’ve never heard of, who speaks funny, does everything wrong but is somehow unerringly cool. Oh well. The collapse of the greatest boom in modern history ought to be at least moderately interesting. Maybe if I could watch it from Mars. Do you think Obama has a hangover? No, I don’t either. I just read the first 6 chapters of my friend Andree’s new novel, Stardust: a Jazz Mystery which takes place in 1992. I want the rest. It’s a pleasure to lie in bed reading and feel like I’m doing somebody a favor…the second time lately that I’ve read a novel ‘for’ someone and found myself entirely drawn in and seduced. It’s nice to have such talented
friends. Maybe I won’t have to buy books anymore.
Mostly in the Afternoon 
I’m still not sure how to put pic where I want them. Any suggestions welcomed.