My dearest, cool today, but it's supposed to be in the seventies this weekend. I'm up in the aerie grasping at what to write. I don't have the energy for political letters, or letters to the editor, about encouraging the passage of the American Jobs Act. I would like for it to pass, I find the obstructionist Republican House truly appalling. But I don't wish to see my name in the paper. So I'm feeling guilty. I'm not even tweeting or twittering or FBing about it. Yet I do care. I guess I'll just reiterate my feeling of long standing, that we're in a very deep bad civil war, and the side that I oppose - globalist - has more loyalty I think to tax & other shelters to be enjoyed in, say, the Caymans, than any nationalist feelings here. The idea of nationalism, of being American is, it seems - I believe to them - quaint, and outdated. Which is scary. I do not find the puppeteers of that machine to be humanist - well, of course not. A notion they would scoff at.

I am so inarticulate on these issues, yet feel them deeply (though tiredly, amid all my aches & fatigue). I was riveted to a C.R. this afternoon, with a very eloquent, confident, truth-telling Michael Lewis on there. Had never heard of him but yeah, I "Like" him very much. He made a lot of sense. He talked about Wall Street and the global financial crisis and the folly of the Too Big Too Fail stratagem - that these financial institutions had been allowed to become as Big as they got, were then bailed out, and now that they have been, they're come roaring back, utterly resistant to regulation and reform. Is anyone surprised? I'm not. Isn't this the Superbrain come to devour us? And I'm not just being one of neighbor's chickens crying The Sky is Falling - but truly - can we not recognize today's threat - not your daddy or granddaddy's - but today's threat for what it is?

The only hope (I guess) for passage of the eminently sensible and desperately needed American Jobs Act would be to hold each Republican obstructionist congressperson's feet to the fire. It seems clear to me that their ultimate purpose (or rather, that of the dog-wagging Tea Party) is to bring down this President, and for largely, I feel in my gut, ugly reasons - they have simply deemed him as "Other" in their books, and thus seek to demonize him, marginalize, pretend he - he the President - is hardly even in the room.

Anyway, I'm done on this topic, I find it so dispiriting, so discouraging. I have the feeling that you yourself, whatever figurative garb you must don to play along, are quite moderate and pragmatic in your views. Others, I think not, though I sometimes have completely fruitless imaginary conversations - that go absolutely nowhere. There's no arguing with a True Believer.

And so, not to bury my head ostrich-like, but maybe I'm better off sticking to my knitting, which is simply to think of you and relax and write of --- well, whatever I'm going to write about. I'm not didactic in that way - that just kills it! (Write about how you love the simple daily things in life because it's so important to smell the roses --- grrrr!!! just tell me what the roses smell like, don't patronizingly lecture that that's what I should be doing!)

Can you tell I'm in a mood? Actually, no I'm not, it's just that I have such a jumble of feelings and impressions and scraps running through my head. Michael Lewis looks very much like 1.0, and I couldn't help but think of that as I watched the interview, especially since I haven't laid eyes on 1.0 in 35 years, so maybe that's what he looks like now (Lewis is a year younger than me), more or less. Not 23 or 24, at any rate, last time I saw 1.0, when we were in a car together, he back from a semester in graduate school, and somehow we didn't connect on that visit. We sat in his car, he was in the drivers seat, engine off, and it wasn't the same. And I was distracted, perhaps - probably - simply wishing a cigarette at that point - and maybe not even wishing to kiss him so much because probably I had cigarette breath - which had never been an issue the pregnant nine months we dated, because I hadn't then smoked, ever.

And then another image that comes to mind today is of you, at your wedding of all things. I've written about this before, and I still wonder if it's the first time I ever met you, I don't know. But I remember encountering you in the receiving line, and you were tall, and dressed formally for the white-wedding occasion, and at least in my mental image I don't see your face - you're taller than me, and sort of in the shadows - and I just feel pierced by having encountered you - a twinge of pain, I can't explain it, but like - I've missed something - I don't know - and yet I was very happy for the bride whom I'd known literally my entire life --- anyway

I just wonder about that single fleeting recurring image I have of you from that time - my earliest recollection of you. Am I projecting back into the past, ascribing some meaning? Was it a very strange instantaneous flash of prescience? Did we, on some level, connect even there, in the most extraordinarily inappropriate, inconvenient, and impossible moment imaginable? Not to mention, unsought-after? I don't know why it haunts me so, that feeling of being just struck, and having to absolutely work overtime beating up my psyche on the occasion of that joyous huge crowded event to absolutely rise above whatever I might be feeling and have a grand time at the lavish event, all the numbered tables in the hotel banquet hall, lights low, music playing... Funny thing is, I don't recall at all if D was there or not, who got married first? I suppose D must have been there, so I guess it was us....

I wonder that you have room in your heart for another woman
but - in other ways I get it
I hope you have a 'room of one's own'
even if it's a motel room in Oklahoma
you mentioned once and I said - oh, that must be hard
and you looked straight at me and said, no it isn't at all

Here's another thing I wonder about
what if we were someday to get together?
and we found that really we have nothing in common,
nothing to talk about?
could that be true?
not that I wish to examine such scenarios too closely - but I do wonder

so it's just as well that we hew to the hard scripts we were given -
you at least
I've been out of mine for a long time now
but it doesn't make me expect you to leave yours

***
all my love, dearest, hope all is well
I never get tired of writing to you
funny, I do tire of writing to certain others - when my heart's not in it
and I do hate to force myself to write, when I'm not feeling it, when the person feels frankly like a drag to me

so I'm not the nicest person in the world either
so I fake it - with him

I really am not as nice a person as you might think
if I lose interest I lose interest
well, the person I'm alluding to was never a romantic interest -

Bless me, dearest, for I have sinned
I do feel that way when I'm feeling mean & disconnected
and someone's fonder of me than I am of them
or I'm supposed to feel something - such as obvious "family feeling" - which for mine I don't

on some level my life is in quest of avoidance of such feelings

and so here we are, you in your rook, and me in mine
goodnight, dear dear raven