I woke up many, many times again, but I didn’t look at my clock as much, and I got back to sleep a little sooner for the first two thirds of the night—then I started looking at my clock, and not being able to get back to sleep; must have been totally awake since about 5:00, and got out of bed around 7:00. So waking up a lot was beginning to look like something I wasn’t going to be able to change in the immediate future, which was a real drag—and I hoped and prayed otherwise—but there weren’t any other changes I could make to my life—there was no solution I could think of that would solve the problem, unless I tried zero caffeine, but that was never going to happen, and, besides, even if I was drinking zero caffeine, I think I’d still be waking up repeatedly. I could only have faith that, as I continued to settle into my new medication routine, and my new routine, things would stabilize. Now, today was Sunday, so that was Curt’s day, my singer songwriter poet Uncle of Idaho, so, this morning, I counted in his voice for about twenty or thirty minutes. My schedule, that I set when I was taking baths again, was as follows: Monday and Tuesday, Craig, my Nashville Uncle; Wednesday and Thursday, Stan, my scotch uncle; Friday and Saturday, Bill, my great grandfather—who, for me, represented the future; and then Curt on Sunday, so Curt only got one day. Now, Bill also represented Picasso, but, I imagined, when speaking to Bill, I would know, based on a general gut feeling or intuition, whether I was talking to someone from the future, a Shakespeare of the future, for example, or Picasso, or, possibly, some other painter, etc.
I’d decided, too, to use my voice of the day, or whatever voice I was prompted to use, when writing my book length poem—my answer to a Shakespearean play. That meant I wouldn’t be using Ursula’s voice by default—that her voice would, for the most part, only be used while writing this my novel. So I relied, mainly, throughout the day, on my voice—but, I considered, I would listen for the promptings of the spirit, and choose, if prompted, some other voice than my own—at least while working. It seemed best, for now, to stick with my voice, or no voice at all, while watching TV. That’s something, and she’s a lovely woman, John said. I imagine that, in the afterlife, I sleep with John’s woman, and he sleeps with mine—that’s it’s our nature—so his opinion mattered more than it might have, otherwise. I imagine, too, that I have a sexual relationship with John—and with Jesus, or, that is, the man that represented Jesus, in real life. I have never used a voice for Jesus—although I picture him, at times, as a man that spoke to me, a few times, at church, when I was in Utah—a man that, I think, for the most part, was a kind of asshole, but, for whatever reasons, remained interesting to me, if only because of the way he, at one time, introduced himself to me, and, also, because I imagined, over time, that he liked the way I sang the hymns. I don’t know, really, if he did or not—many people, I think, didn’t—I was too loud and aggressive, but, in my defense, all that emotional energy that built up all week long had to go somewhere, and, at the time, I had no where else to put it, and, furthermore, just because I lived in opposition to the Mormon creed, it didn’t mean that my relationship was inferior. I still had a relationship with God, with Jesus, with myself, whether I was completely consciously aware of it, and what it entailed, or not.
You can have sex with me, Anna was saying over and over—I guess, in part, because I admitted that John and I share partners, but I must be clear—I knew far better than to think that Anna would consciously say this, at this time in her life, to anyone, especially me. So we’re talking about a 5D existence or some hyper-imaginary 4D reality in which she is both aware of, and loves, my work, and, also, she’s every bit as free, and bi, as I secretly think, deep down, she is—but, again, to say something like that—without making it explicitly clear that its all from an imaginary realm, and that, in the cold light of day, I’d expect her to find this offensive—that I wouldn’t expect her to love me or my work, even if our paths, in that sense, should cross, and I managed somehow, to make a decent living. Even in that world, she would find such ideas offensive—but, even still, I trust my instincts, and, although I would never act on the ideas I get from my imaginary world alone, it doesn’t change the fact that I get a gut feeling, however conceited, that she’s a lot like me, and that the person I was talking to was the real, actualized person, the person she would be, if circumstances permitted.
Ever since I started watching, in my moderate, limited capacity, people having sex again, I’d begun to find myself attracted to a wider array of women—women that I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. And Anna, despite the reservations expressed in my previous books, fit well within these boundaries—that is to say, ever since I’d expanded my sex life—now that I was including a greater range of people and types, I no longer wondered if her imperfections were insurmountable. She was enough, and the sex, and the romance, and heaven, would take care of the rest. So, I imagined, I’d learned something about myself—plenty of women are good enough, physically, maybe not in my area, but in general, and the fact that I couldn’t engage any of them had to do with the fact that I couldn’t support myself, them, and a family—not some idea that they were not attractive enough, or some notion that, eventually, they wouldn’t be attractive enough, or that I, on the other hand, had some unnatural block that prevented me from engaging a sexual relationship. I was a little different, still. Many people would engage in sexual activity even if abortion turned out to be the end result. I didn’t believe in abortion, and, if I had a child, I wanted to be able to look after it, and be a part of its life. But if that was possible, if I made enough money, and I was stable enough, on my own, then I wasn’t so different, at least in the sense that I might be able to look past a lot that I, in the past, wouldn’t have been able to look past, in order to establish a sexual relationship and an ensuing emotional connection, or vice versa, such that, after that, I had no regrets.