Funeral For A Friend

"We need to tell them she's human too." -- a sales vendor named Jeff who has no idea

While Sean Hannity broadcasts CPAC 18 live, and I only make note of the physiological inability to drum up the enthusiasm for what the speeches and mini-bar raids signify in relation to the state of conservatism in America today, always vocal enough, whatever its failures, to look askance at social media purges, Karina breezed back into my life because the Muslim who will soon be redeployed back to her own kind, suggested, “Call her back,” and with great reluctance, I did. Thus I was treated to Rover the dog, flash drives of her men, because I allowed myself to be persuaded. It would have been more optimal had I remained firm when I told her on Facebook to let me go. The mother died from her melanoma yesterday, and Miss Kraus had the presence of mind to text me the information in a simple sentence, a sentence which might have been a rebuff, as pertains my own growing weakness, or simply the need to connect. I am domicile to the region, so is the mother, a woman I spoke to once, chaffing against the burden of this circumstance. Gretchen Laskas posted about the passing of her best friend’s father during this mild oscillation into my daily living, and I am not going to recant it specifically; it is her world, experience that belongs to what made her, and I couldn’t enter into it even if I consider her a friend, which I do, but she hit on what I had once and took away from myself by returning to the city, the conspiratorial intimacy with someone you’ve bonded to. Linda and I had it for a little while, and it is how she defended herself when she threw me off guard preening about spastic climaxes: she meant it as a conspirator, as if my love life was commensurate with her marital intimacy. (It wasn’t, and for the record, I doubt my convulsions make my orgasms more pleasurable than those of more mobile women.) It may seem inconsiderate to raise an objection to my former cleaning woman’s loss, but Karina cannot fill the void she thinks she can for me, just as I could only be a temporary economic support, little more. I can’t comfort her as if we’d known each other all our lives.

I can, despite this machine, wash my own hair, but I’d never hear the end of it from the Muslim, and have to consider this something of a write off herein, the corrosion of all this dependence is like the autonomic shock conclusion in Carnival of Souls.

 Though it is a different genre, this movie mourns humanism to nearly the same degree Amazon does with Electric Dreams. It takes us awhile to realize we’ve bought it, still trying to swim  while we sink.