to see mad tom of bedlam

i give so much money to the birds and the cats and the homeless people who live behind the whole foods by my house. really, we are becoming friends. there have never been homeless so regular as to provide me with the rare opportunity of saying i have made their acquaintance. i want to be able to say i know what their lives are like in the form that they will share it to me. but not yet. right now all i know is that they tell me i have nice shoes, that i can't help but give them five, one hundred dollars whenever i see them.

i haven't opened a philosophy book in too long. simultaneously afraid of and nostalgic for nietzsche, like a father. like a father equally as angry and tyrannical and influential as my own. my paintings are the only ones with whom i have improved my relationship since i left new college, a newfound patience and trust in the internal logic of the images which i couldn't have anticipated and cannot thank enough for the existence of -- particularly for the fear that the discussion of them will make them vanish into the night, a cadmium will-o-wisp. i loved those when i was little.

i was unabashedly un-urban when i was young. i gardened not because it was the proper actiivity for women but because i could lord over a world there, create things that inspired my own attention, find privacy that is rare here. i am glad i didn't get to work on the farm in massachussetts because the multiple emergency root canals which several years of white person poverty created in the recesses of my teeth, but the privacy is still waiting for me. there is a zen monastery here waiting for me to build sheds for them, live off lentil soup. there is a world waiting for me to be its exhibitionist, its subject of controversy and disconcertment. fashionable dismissal.

to see mad tom of bedlam ten thousand miles i'll travel.