Sick Narcissist. George Castanza’s Problem. False Asses. Heredity. More on Loss. Russian Brides.

--Sick, I look good.

Fever gives the eyes more color, more clearness, the appearance of focus and lucidity. The face itself becomes shaper, the burn showing through.

I had to feel good looking and waste it, but who wants to be around people when sick? I envision myself as far away as possible. In a tent above timberline of some snow-covered Alaskan mountain, sleeping my fever sleep, dreaming my fever dreams.

Waking every now and then to look in the mirror.

--The ideas that come fully to me when I’m ill are likewise good, or, at least, likewise seem good to my sick mind.

--It occurs to me, for example, that no woman wants a man that she has not broken herself.

--I look at cleavage. I do not look at it because it turns me on. I look at it because I can not help but looking. She doesn’t have to match my taste. It doesn’t have to be cleavage on a woman I consider attractive. She can be very old or very out of shape and have cleavage and I’ll still look and try not to.

I don’t want a woman with cleavage to think I am a looking at her for any sexual reason. What would that reason be? To memorize that particular arrangement of cleavage so as to fantasize about it in private later?

I don’t want cleavage bearing women to believe I am checking them out.
I don’t want to be branded a fiend or a letch.
Nor do I want to appear to be a man who bows down before breasts pushed close together, or any of the things that still tend to bring modern men low.
Sampson always puts his head in Delilah’s lap.
The sailor always false from grace with the sea.

But that is not what cleavage does to me.

It’s just an oddity.
It’s a birthmark.
An strangely shaped organ.
An eyelash on the cheek.

Simply, it calls attention to itself, the way a button or a pin or the words on a t-shirt call for attention. It says, Hey now, I’m a bit different—I’m a line where often you don’t see one—would you look at me please?

If you wear cleavage, you should be aware of this. You should put it on like any other accessory. As something meant to be noticed.

And do not mistake our falling eyes as symbols for the power of your beauty.

Still, I try not to look. I go to absurd lengths. Not even granting myself a peek at the face. Focusing my eyes away from the owner and her cleavage so that they water and cross themselves trying to break my command.

--An interesting side note.

Some evolutionary scientists theorize that human males are stunned by cleavage because it replicates an ass.

In the way long ago, according to the theory, males needed a visual clue that would immediately kick their sex drives into high gear, and, presumably, kick a lot of blood into their primitive penises.

The best time for these males to turn on in this way when the female of the species was in a position accommodating to coital entry.

For example, she might be kneeling by a stream and drinking.

Ass, the lizard mind in the primitive male says.
It’s time, the lizard mind says.
Get erect and go forward.

A very distinct image.

So that a man in the bar might think he’s just looking at some girl’s cleavage but what his lizard mind is really is really seeing is a primitive girl bending over a stream.

--A clear lightbulb, standing on end, can look very much like a false ass, too. I wonder if this fetish market has been explored.

--A lizard mind is the most primitive part of the brain. Fight or flight is in there. And, I presume, fuck is too.

--The lesson my father accidentally taught me that has been most damning:
Trust is everything.
Show great affection and loyalty to those you trust.
Consider those you don’t as enemies.
A person proves him or herself trustable only by thinking as I think.
Or learning to think as I think.
Or just taking my word for it.

--How automated things have gotten. At the airport the woman tells me I want to go to the automatic check-in as opposed to the counter. I tell her I do not want to go.

The fast food restaurant at the end of the security check in is likewise automated. They have these machines and people standing in front of them with their credit cards out, the way it works now at the grocery store.

I’m no luddite, but I hate this vision of big business trying to save money. It’s not even the humans who will lose their jobs I worry about. They’re lousy jobs anyway. It’s that I feel I need special service. I need to be waited on. And a machine can’t do that. It wants me to meet it halfway. To do half the work.

I don’t even like to push the proper buttons on the telephone when I call customer service. I just press randomly until somebody finally comes on.

--There were soldiers in the airport, perhaps fifteen of them, lead by a woman in a red and white. She was waving pom-poms and enticing the crowds to cheer the soldiers, who obviously have just returned from Iraq.

I grew up idolizing green on green fatigues. My son will grow up with the images of sand on sand.

I walked amongst the soldiers and found myself trying to smell the desert from which I imagine they’ve emerged.

I thought of my own time in the Middle East and the bad luck I brought back with me.
Or maybe it wasn’t bad luck. Maybe that was when I just started making bad decisions.
Or maybe it is that that is when I started recognizing my decisions as bad.

--I love my memories but I recognize that legitimate memories are always based on loss.

--Loss makes the world grow smaller.

There are place I don’t want to go. Streets I don’t want to cross; grocery store aisles I don’t want to wander. I x out sections on maps.

These are places haunted by people I will never be again.
And they have that awful and sweet smell of a candy I will never eat again.

--My advice:
Don’t go into the world. Don’t see new things.
Don’t meet new people.
Don’t put yourself in any situation in which your heart might become divided.
For a divided heart will always miss one thing when it is in the comfort of another. A divided heart will never rest. It will seek to bring all the divisions together, all the lovers and all the cherished places and all that mess of impossibility smashed into it so that it can hold them all and not have to rely on memory.

And not have to try to forget.

--I hate dropping my son off. But it calms me too, to see him with his mother, whom he misses, to know that he is happy to go back to a place he calls home.

I don’t need him to miss me. It breaks me heart that he does.

--Josh goes to Uzbekistan. I meant to tell him, one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met was from Uzbekistan.

Like a child who has once seen a bear cross the road at a particular place and always imagines he will see it there again, I imagine that all women in Uzbekistan are so perfectly beautiful.

Josh will disabuse me.