Rummy
January 11, 2009 § 1 Comment
i drank his Christmas present
I’m hungover, Philips thinks I should quit drinking and I want to, though whether I want to enough remains to be seen. I’m not so much worried about the hangover days but the ordinary drinking, how it dulls me and retards my imagination. That’s not true exactly–it feeds my imagination in some ways, but I’ve had a lot of that kind of food lately, and I need the perspective of sobriety more. That exacting clarity. What I’m afraid of is that I feel so pulled into my writing these days, the novel and this blog and all the other novels half written and hanging around, that I already have difficulty seeing the point of being with people, though I do get lonely. Alcohol helps. Sometimes it becomes the point of being with people, which is bad, but what can I say? I don’t have anything to say anymore, in person; it’s all going to the writing. I know I can figure this out. I don’t feel particularly worried, for some reason. Maybe the last glass of rum is still feeding me its sweet southern delusions.
Philip is with Christine today. I’m still at his apartment, because of the hangover, and writing this on his computer. It’s all a little strange. They’re watching a football game tgether. I’m glad I don’t have to do that. Still–and though I am thinking actively and lovingly about my own husband and looking forward to seeing him again–imagining Philip with his wife (and the cats and the dog) makes me want to stick knives in him. This is why everyone thinks my life is crazy. It is. I want to bark at the moon. I want to take LSD and sit in the bushes all night talking to unscary ghosts as I did in Virginia, in 1978, then lie on the floor all day reading Proust. (Actually I sat outside all night in the summer and read Proust in the winter. I remember that because we dragged the mattress down in front of the oven to save on heat. )
Mostly in the Afternoon 
I’ve had similar feelings lately: I want to dance at night encircled by cows, with their big black eyes barely visible, flickering in the moonlight . I’ll be in Charlottesville in a couple of weeks, I have a strange desire to re-enact some of those nights in the fields, and woods with the wild rhodadendron.