Hello darling, are you alright? I wonder, from the few page hits I've received today, which I imagine (perhaps wrongly) are from you: the disturbing image of Francis Bacon's paralytic child, damaged, on all fours; an old post of mine, Notes of a Panic Attack; and a search this morning, landing on the lovely Picasso etching, of the Minotaur caressing the hand of the sleeping woman with his cheek...

Well, if they're from you, I don't have to spell it out for you... I wonder, and worry a bit, though completely hopelessly, because there is nothing I can do, save for what I'm doing at this very moment, which is thinking of you, and tapping these keys. I'm sure you don't have it easy, I don't see how you could with so much on your plate, but I do hope that things are manageable, tolerable.

I myself am so bushed, so beat at the moment, that I feel almost faint. But valiantly I type (sitting here stripped down to my braless slinky tee and panties, sipping from a refreshingly icefilled glass). It's gotten very sunny out, and warm, and it's been humid and rainy all week, so now things are quite steamy -- not just in my mind & body, which I unfortunately never did get around to today... ah well. I'm just back from a walk around here, with weights, and I tried to keep to the shaded areas, out of direct blazing sun, best I could, and so I cut through the vast cool green graveyard behind the church -- it's big as a Brooklyn city block, that ancient cemetery - that's how cheap real estate is around here. It's a beautiful plot of land, up on high ground, and I cut through to the back of it to what I imagine must have been an old Native-American trail, a pinestrewn path, so leafy and cool and peaceful, that leads pleasantly downhill and delivers me creekside to the road, where I usually end up anyway, via a longer no not circumlocutory - but circuitous route (this, a reference to a word I had a mind to amend this morning, from last evening's post, but never got around to).

Also exhausted because I did a hell of a lot of ironing today, all the upstairs curtains, in advance of the house swap next week. This place has its issues (e.g., a pair of huge stacked cartons, next to the out-of-tune albatross Steinway in the so-called dining room, containing --- now mind you, these cartons have been there for - five years? I've lost count -- bathtubs, intended for the bathrooms, that never got redone) -- but hey, at least all the linens will be clean.

I'm just riffing here, darling, very tiredly. I think of the TV series we've been Netflixing lately, called Modern Family. It's extremely witty and sharply observed - I highly recommend it - you get drawn into the madcap characters very quickly. Honestly, they're feeling like my family in a way. Well why not - since I don't have one! (I don't mean that bitterly, just shaking my head a little - what, ruefully, wryly? Ahhhh whadever... channel the Colombian-accented Sofia Vergara character rolling her eyes, sneering eloquently, and dismissing all with a sexy gesture of her manicured hand.)

Oh, right -- so my scenario here -- latter day version of "one of the causes of the French Revolution" -- "property rich/cash-poor" -- the forevermore stacked bathtubs in the paid-for house -- a small metaphor for the overdevelopment and subsequent collapse of Ireland -- right here, writ at my house. Call the series -- Modern Economy. And Mitt Romney can guest star in some episode... when he shows up, say, late one night in a raging blizzard, his dog strapped to the roof of his car, and he says to us -- we're standing around in our bathrobes, incredulous ("is that who we think it is?" that he's in our solarium), and he says, as D tries to fire up the pellet stove, but it's acting up again, and the cats have darted out the door into the freezing night -- that he's headed for Florida. Well of course, Florida, yeah, duh, we'd love to be there too, beaches, sun, palm trees, of course, as we stand there shivering in the cold night. But what's Mitt's reason, as he stands there grinning at us, not quite seeing us -- why is he contemplating moving to Florida? For the tax breaks.

No kidding, that's what I heard on C.R. today, from one or the other of his lame establishment pundits, As I Stood Ironing.

Oh sweetheart, yet another mess of a post, hope you're enjoying it. It's my typerly equivalent of hanging endlessly on a cellphone -- aren't you glad I don't do that? But if I did... well... perhaps a message such as this... if the phone on the other end had gone dead and I wasn't even aware of it -- well a transcript of such a monologue -- might well look like this.

Hi - sweetheart (shit, what's wrong with this thing?) - can you hear me now?

love you, hope all's well
many kisses -- thinking of you --