All the girls are sitting on a pile of gold.

I should be sleeping. I woke up at midnight to N asking me to call AAA while he was stranded on the side of a Bradenton road with a dead battery and no gas. I am singing there is one singing in the back of a U-Haul truck to an appreciative crowd and a quick tempo. Talked to a lady at a Racetrack gas station at 5:30 in the morning who wanted $3.00 for milk to give her youngest child -- she said wouldn't have been there if it weren't that he wouldn't stop crying. She asked me if I wanted one of her children.

I am hovering My grandmother has been sedated on a ventilator in the hospital for about a week. I am not sure whether the medical procedures being performed on her are in accordance with her living will, which asks that we not needlessly, "artificially extend the process of her dying." I have thoughts that I can't articulate about biopolitics here. Tell my mother that we all have a right to life because the live-stock farmer makes more money with every calf born. I can't help it if my father has a high school education and that in this country mind is only exercised ex officio. But I can help it if I stay up all night drawing a mural and making powerful friends who will help me find as many loopholes out of poverty as are there, waiting, risky, unexamined. Charity and self-interest are coextensive. I don't want to stand above morality with the anxious stiffness of someone who fears falling -- I want to float.

Poverty
is a pretense, as is
wealth.

A painting that has dried has a primeval person in it. She is on yellow, offering darkened grapes to a black horse. Old roommates spent nine dollars on each bottle of foul-smelling beer. I am awed at the horrible insignificance of it and admire their dance.

Q spoke to me for three hours on the phone and told me to keep my mouth shut. She says that women infuriate her husband by propositioning him at the drive-thru of one of their dry-cleaning franchises which are not flourishing in Tampa. "Shy Rose Cleaners." Q says that she is a mother to X, the boy she calls my boyfriend, now that his own mother has died. Q says that the government in the United States is like the government in Myanmar. We have no reason to trust it.

In Myanmar, Q was drugged and given an abortion without consent. Q recommends that any woman receiving an engagement ring of any import take it privately to a jeweler's and have it checked for authenticity. She says the problem of the Cubix Zirconium is one problem they didn't have in Myanmar.

Q says I should be making powerful friends and finding ways to set myself up with an apartment in New York. X and I speak early in the morning 12 hours apart, laughing incessantly whenever English fails us. He doesn't mention my visit. Q says that he doesn't want me to visit him in Singapore yet because he is not sure what his roommates will do to me. We will wait until they move out or find girlfriends. He says nothing to me about this, but sends me messages which say -- "i remember u." I have not yet met X but he still sends kind words on the day my grandmother has several screws deadbolted into her third and fourth vertebrae.

Y grew up in the Himalayas and tells me that Americans don't understand friendship.