Ellen Fagan, John McCloy, Henri Laborde and Paul Robert McDonough, this is for youse

     Taking care of the Kansas kitties early every a.m., wake sometimes at dawn (shadeless windows, WHY??)  and never do go back to sleep.   Feel my heart pounding, slam a single-fingered hit of vodka.  Sometimes helps.  Often does not (the tolerance dismays me).  
Sick of doing this; it takes too much to calm me down so little & leaves me simply tired -- but I gotta chase the fear & anxiety out of my brain or I cannot seem to bear the single-second-after-the-next of being alive, the simple experiencing of every moment that life is, or should, be.  

      And the help I need is spiritual, not psychological.   My mind can perform any acrobatic spin around any ‘precept’ intellectually proffered.  No, thanks.  Again, as usual – as always!  I need to feel it in my BODY.  Had no idea I was such a rampant materialist.  Sometimes I think, baby needs her bottle -- & it really is that simple -- and, of course, that bizarre & complex, too – a tightrope walker who cannot step forth without the pole.  Gotta hang on to something, even if it ain't gonna do shite to help your fall! 

         Maybe this comes from being a terror-stricken infant whose mother left it to figure her own misery out when she cried.  And I did!  I now absolutely understand that if you need something, you gotta go get it yourself (thank God for my Auntie Maureen, who gave me Hodoll! -- and that's pronounced HAW-doll, you pervs) -- 
     -- & eventually that will lead to how many things you can go without.  You’ll ask for her attention and she will act as though stabbed in the gut with the hideous nightmare that would be putting you in her lap RIGHT NOW, when she has just sat down with her dashing husband in her charming Madrid home, finally getting to the cocktails!

         (Hmmm…I’m feeling something odd…a strange sense of parallelism but I don’t quite know why…)

         [Pause:  sip.  'Nother sip.  Nearly empty.]

         Still.  (Still: what an odd phrase.  STILL.  Stop.  As in listen, look?)   At me, that’s the subtext.  And then again, not.  It’s also:  wait.  Think again.  There are so many other answers.  Including those you cannot conceive of – somebody, entity, sentient being, the inanimate breathing, Haig-Bosin Particle (aka dark matter aka the God molecule) – I make entreaty of thee to make Thy Self/Selves apparent, somehow.  

     I ask that you unmask, wrap thyselves around me, Kali, Ganesh, the Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ, Mother Mary, Yahweh, St. Anthony (because I am always misplacing stuff!), *and my favorite of all time, St. Francis of Assissi* (esp, as it turns out, I was born in his nameplace!)  The greatest animal lover e-ver. 

         I remember feeling (doubtless under the influence, I believe, of legal MDMA – hoo/ those were!/the good old/days!) the reality that is the infinitude of love, and its microscopic depths, too, but the memory does not warm me, nor leaves me an iota less scared.  Only actual experience, in the axis of time (now) & space (here), as in:  the present, will suffice -- even as it is the only locus in which to have an experience, it is also always in the process of becoming both its own future and its own past – thus you are really occupying now/here (nowhere) while already someplace else; and of course, we cannot forget our past trajectories, either.  
     (We would love to, but our body would never allow it.  And mind, naturally, is much more tenacious, while the heart can bleed over its own bruises for entire lifetimes of pumping.  Spirit itself becomes damaged, falters in faith, stops knowing itself, is estranged from others and especially separate from the cosmic relatives…)

         'Every radio host needs a great go-out line.'

         (I  paraphrase.   Either from Bullseye, 360 or RadioLab.

Dude Thorne, je crois.  Ouehhh….je crois que c'est lui).

         Mine is:

         Looking for truth?  Follow  the parenthetical aside.
         Either that, or fuck you, I'm from New York.
You guys choose!

In my fifth hour of insomania, I send you
ALL OF MY LOVE/ALL OF MY LOVE/ ALL OF MY LOVE/TO YOU...