My silly friends

Quint Buchholz's My Penguin and Me

I’m forever being surprised by my friends’ capacity for self delusion but then I’m no better for I’ve written a ten item list of to-dos that include less work and more play. Now, I ask you what sort of person sets herself a task she is sure to fail at? And I’ll tell you at least I’m not a weak armed tech-head convinced he’s going to climb Everest before he is forty. It is madness, pure madness I tell ya. He gets winded climbing three flights of stairs but who knows he is only thirty-seven. I suppose between now and forty he could get super motivated.

My love my care,

Simone

An Awful Blind Date

Summer 2009

FYI: I still don’t trust the judgement of the friend who arranged our meeting


NGC 3132 The Eight Burst Nebula

He was the sort of fellow that attracted scientific curiosity with his close-set eyes and sallow skin, the result I’m certain of inbreeding conjoined twins created on The Island of Dr. Moreau. Sitting there with his smug sneer in his Brooks Brothers suit spouting rhetoric acquired from too many viewing of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. To say the man had the intellectual curiosity of a dust mite is a gross offence to the mite for it at least served a purpose. He was rude to the serving staff and for the thirty-minutes I was able to tolerate his company I became certain he would die alone. Proving once more my complete inability to accurately assess the finer points of a desirable mate for I not so long ago ran into the little toad and he is now engaged to married.

My love my care,

Simone

Perception without judgement

An elegant mid-aged woman tends the humidor at an exclusive gentlemen’s club and drinks brilliant espressos made awful with a spoon of condensed milk added. She tell with regularity an appalling semi-autobiographical tale which I`ve heard a dozen times and will now tell you.

She assures all it`s cautionary, I`m certain it`s no more than dreadful. Still, she swears it would not have been so had she been a man.

Frederick Childe Hassam's Tanagra

He knows how much she feels for she was never any good at coy or aloof and though he bears it as burden, she is nonetheless hopeless against his charm. She wants to be strong, fine her legs and free him from the yoke. He sees it in her eye and he flinches with something like pity. This she could not abide. Yes, she had been pitiable but what could she do? He was her ideal. Her misfortune perhaps but then the fates had been cruel for it was there she at sixty and he no more than twenty-seven had come to meet. He wanted none of what she had to offer but he had been kind and in charity offered her tendre as token but never so much that it would be interpreted as hope. In return for his compassion he was granted all she valued in a sort of rancorous projectile that seemed to haemorrhaged from her every pore. It had been her plan to ruin him with creature comforts but there was futility in it for he never grew to love her and so their end.

My love my care

Simone

Lunch with an heartbroken friend

Steely Dan's Peg and Ambrosia's How Much I Feel has the strange distinction of being the only songs I can listen to twenty times in a row without wanting to take an hammer to the player. This I learnt after two hours with the bereaved.

Black and Red by John White Alexander

I long to see you but I am bearing well your absence. Why, I’ve only looked at your photo a hundred times today and that’s near ten times less than yesterday. Beside the image in the frame stop resembling you long ago. The young man in the photo is handsome with your face and smile only he isn’t you. He is everlasting youth, strong, beautiful and somehow less.

My love my care,

Simone