The Stunner

I sometimes see a woman so beautiful I want no more than to write her a happy ending and it is not always just a charming face either. Sometimes it is no more than a small gesture or kindness done that makes her in that moment worthy of notice. I’ll give you an example; there is an elderly oriental woman who panhandles at Young and College in front the Starbucks on the corner. She sits there silently with a baseball cap in her hand looking slightly embarrassed and apologetic. I’d often give her the change from my coffee rather than tip the barista and feel pretty okay about it until a few days ago when I saw this pretty black girl sitting beside her with Tupperware in hand. I’ve seen this young woman before and thought her lovely enough and even spoke with her once something about notebooks and her being French, Caribbean from Martinique but it was not until I saw her sharing her lunch and listening with open interest as the little beggar whisper some secret to her did I want to write her story. In that moment she was perfect heroine and goddess deserving of brilliant happy end. Oh, and beautiful, she truly was. Her smile held such tender understanding for the little woman sitting next to her it filled my heart and broke it all at once.

first female astronaut candidates

I imagine that in order for something like that to work well – me writing her happy ending, that is - I would have to interview her and find out what that constitutes for her because it simple would not do. Now, would it? For me to write for her some happiness I dreamt up but which she finds hellish.

My love my care,

Simone

My ideal, the wrong me

I’m often cruel without having been sentential and can even be sentential about my cruelty but then the focus of my malevolence is almost exclusively self so I image there is no help for it. 

  

Tamara de Lempicka's Dormeuse

I loved this man once for whom I wanted to be a hundred impossible things. I would see him and instantly take catalogue of my flaws. He made me desperate for with him I was nothing but want. Want for his love, for longer legs and smaller waist and firmer tits. It drove me mad wanting to be younger, faster, stronger for someone who was no more than sweet for who I already was and so I left him. It took time for me to love again and when I did it was to a man who right from the beginning kissed me as if anticipating a long parting.

My love my care,

Simone

April’s fool

I really do believe in love you know and that despite never having seeing any true manifestation that could not be explained away as something else. It is a matter made worse I believe due to these long conversations I have with my sister about the plausibility of romantic love where the end result is always dread of dying alone. Following that line of reasoning, lately the idea of tribe or rather our society’s lack of connect to an extended tribe where one feels ownership and connect has been running parallel with the notion of love lost. There is this idea that we love our pets, best friends, children and all else is a matter of necessity or chance. Fool that I am I want to explore more this idea.



James Childs's Bow Bridge

Then again our only duty is beauty to put forth what is true and good, which would make love the entire thing, right?

My love my care,

Simone

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