My husband is kind this was Jack Daniel’s wife talking—so long as Jack was president, she was getting rich. but why was she speaking to me—but, that’s just it, i don’t think she was. I think somebody sent me a message, saying something along the lines of you are kind. sometimes things are switched up in telepathic world, as you might remember me mentioning before: you get good things in neutral and sometimes negative containers because you’re protecting your message from spies that would tune in to the future frequency and other times you’re just so familiar with the person that nothing comes as a shock—so you interpret: this person represents someone that i really want to talk to and I’m seeing this because they are letting me down—they are telling me that they, in fact, are human, and that happiness is relative no matter what your circumstances are.
now, someone else was saying—and since Ursula was on the line I gather that this, at least in part, was coming from her: all women spend enormous amounts of time on their hair—and your racist if you think otherwise. But I think what this person meant—i’d heard this particular package on TV saying something very similar—was that blonds spend a lot of time and money on their hair. But even then, you didn’t spend as much time and money on your hair as a black woman with straight hair did. but why was Ursula sending me this? The question itself, and the possible answers, encoded, I’m sure, what she was trying to get me to understand. After allowing some thoughts to pass through my head, I was left to interpret the following a) she was showing me Michelle Obama saying that running for president would be a waste of her time because America wasn’t ready for a woman president, and, b) she was showing me a former astronaut, now a senator of Arizona, in the news, of late, for standing up to Jack Daniels.
if you’re as talented as you think you are, then, with a little help, you should run for president! and, well, she had a point: but she was missing the main point: i’m an acquired taste—I’m not someone you fall in love with overnight, in part because i’ve done so many different things, and, well, you didn’t want to let a man that only comes around every so often into your home unless he was the real McCoy—unless he played it cool, just like almost throwing a no-hitter in baseball, you don’t speak of it until it happens, and, as such, you don’t speak of me—and, indeed, outside of my work I don’t speak of me, because you don’t want to ruin it one, and, two, because it’s such a big deal it’s hard to believe that you deserve all the glory that you’d get if you really did throw a no-hitter. So there—I understood that; my no-hitter would be realized after I was dead—but that didn’t mean that a part of me could be understood, in part, before then, and that the people, indeed, could like me.
i think i’d got it right, because all of sudden the line went quiet—i wondered if she was too busy, at this point, to speak to me—indeed, i missed out on her yesterday, as I paid a call to one of my brothers—ate Chinese food, and gained three pounds, which, i’m told, is mostly the effect of sodium and water, and will drop off in a couple days. what are you doing? there, i heard her—she was back. “I’m trying to talk to you—i got your message and i’m tempted, of course, to be the greatest person that ever lived, but it’s such a long shot that it’s a thought that’s best packed away in a storage bin so that nobody, including me, gets messed with or insulted for no apparent reason.
but this is just you and me here “i suspect that Gaugin and his thirteen year old wives are forcing their way in—they know i like his paintings; because of that I’m vulnerable to all the other things that, sadly, are just plain wrong. But there’s also this big leeway when it comes to historical figures because they might’ve been telepathic and driven to extremes to self-medicate and silence certain thoughts or emotions.” that was a huge statement to send to someone telepathically—but we had a good connection. are you a rapist and a pedophile? I had to choose my words carefully, because i believed that women, when they menstruate, are legal—at least to boys their own age. But no, I wouldn’t consider myself a pedophile, because, as it happens, i wouldn’t break the law, and a young woman, in her formative years, doesn’t need to be consumed by the wake of some older man that cares nothing about the fact that these young women should be protecting themselves from unilateral action, such as having themselves suppressed by some full-blown personality—someone that could easily abandon them when they are dependent, financially and emotionally, and might not be able to get by on their own.
what are you going to do for me? “Excuse me?” If i make you president, what are you going to do for me in return? “Good question.” what could I do—and who’s to say that, in the end, I would run the country if it meant sitting around talking about nothing and doing almost nothing for nearly a decade of my life? Do you know how many paintings I could make in eight years? “I wouldn’t run for president if I had to sacrifice my creative endeavors, and my intellectual pursuits—and yet I also knew that being president would go a long way toward making me, and my work, good, qualifiable history. “You get to come with me.” So, yeah, Ursula must’ve been wondering, since she was so young, how she was going to spend her fifties if she became president before she turned forty.
you’d be a hand-me down president—“and that would be the best kind,” so, what now? “what do you have to say, Ursula?” I’m like a spinning top “I agree.” watch it, buster, only i get to criticize me—but yeah, something in my life has always been revolving around something else—and, at times, at break-neck speeds. i didn’t want to say anything, but she was spinning around the man in her life—once she didn’t have a man in her life, the real Ursula would emerge. but I didn’t want her to hate me, and I also knew that there wouldn’t be a man in her life unless he was serving a specific purpose—perhaps to keep her stabilized? therefore to act like she should leave her man was wrong; when the time was right, she would, and, if he, in fact—if they evolved together, then the spinning top analogy wouldn’t matter so much; but, in that case, she might not be able to focus on the task at hand—becoming the president.
She just called me a piranha! said i had no business judging her—and I didn’t, i know. But I didn’t feel like i was judging so much as I was making educated guesses based on what I knew about her—if those guesses were clouded by my feelings for her, then I couldn’t help that any more than she could help loving someone else. It would be a shame, though, if we never united, since, as I understand it, we could have so many good conversations—we could come together in every way, our love would be at the center of everything—argument or no argument. you’re going to drive me mad. and maybe that would happen, but I wouldn’t abandon her because of that, especially given my background—i’d only abandon her if she took me for granted, or if, and this was a definite possibility, she was going to backslide all over again. I sent her this message, then: “a born leader never gets to go home.”