Dear Charles,
I have been meaning to sit down and post another entry of this rambly scrawl of a journal, this omnium gathered of pips and pops, drawn out squibs, you might have called them. But life has been either too hectic or fun to do so. But then I realized it was your death day. My unknown and only-half friend, how could I not stop a moment and salute you with a respectful grab of the crotch?
I raise a glass to your Precious Notes:
1. Do, every day, what duty and prudence dictate.
2. Always be a poet, even in prose.
3. The grand style (nothing more beautiful than the commonplace).
4. First make a start, then apply logic and analysis.
5. Even hypothesis demands a conclusion.
6. To achieve a daily madness.
(from Intimate Journals, Trans. Christopher Isherwood)
As you would approve, I cherry-pick from your tenets. I am not you, and no longer seek what we see of your shadow alleys. I allow you to be you. I am only now beginning to know me.
On this, another Day of Your Death, I speak of change. I will speak of it in the bourgeoisie style you despised. The cassette tape Voltaires of your Paris. My gift to you.
I am changing in a foundational way. I try to stay cognizant of the world within and without, assessing the changes and turns and inflections of tone, heat, and distance. Visions of the past and its playful, ominous ebbing flow from these shadows I am beginning to create in this, the second half of a life. The present, how it earns its keep by posting constantly, getting paid for advertising yesterday in new clothes, for never ceasing to remix its own songs in an endless stream arranged (and now DJ'd) by cutting edge AI. Administrators available by email only. And all the while I preserve my rituals, my childlike but necessary attempts to crystalize the fluid, to make concrete and holy the fleeting moments that perhaps are as ignorable as they are important to me. The way I feel I am almost able to hold back the tide (my gray is almost entirely on my face), but my body feels heavy for the very first time, as if gravity has suddenly increased just for me, making me nearly the same weight and cumber as any other human. Strange that this would seem strange to me, for it is without hyperbole that I say that, before now, I have always felt either my immortality, the martial training I underwent in my virginal years (or, likely some marriage of the two) somehow afforded me a lithe, acrobatic dexterity that belied the years I accumulated as heads-up coins in the street. Perhaps, once one distances himself so far from either a mental or physical state of purity, of velvet-sigh carte blanche, entropy feels itself free to doggrel atop our weakening figure. Purity, the treasure made unnatural naturally by nothing more than time. ###
That is all, dear Charles, for this time. I have given you enough to laugh about and share with those few with whom you now raise your glass. Enjoy, rearrange, improve, destroy. Indulge in all your favorite annihilations. You've earned it.
I close with a song for you. Walk your now and forever streets. May they despise you perfectly.
With only a half-bow,
Michael
