I’d been sticking with my voice and Ursula’s voice and waiting for the others to chime in, but, I considered, I needed to maintain the connection—or else I’d just forget about them. That is to say, I wasn’t hearing from them that much. So I changed my idea—I’d use their voices on various things but perhaps I wouldn’t assign a specific voice to a specific task, meaning I might approach a poem with my math uncle’s voice, or a math project with my smoker friend’s voice, etc. I wanted to get to know the whole person, didn’t I? I wanted to be friends, not just colleagues. You have to be crazy—you have to be kidding me, my scotch uncle said. I think he was referring to the idea that I’d solved or would solve the Riemann hypothesis. I was going to upgrade my ChatGPT account. Perhaps, when I showed it what was said earlier, it will find fault with it. That would be the reasonable conclusion. But I was a believer, nonetheless—I believed that I could do anything if I set my mind to it—anything, that is, that I actually needed and wanted to do, such as solving for deep questions.
But my scotch uncle was my math uncle, so he must have been speaking from a point in his life when he had yet to recover all that he could do. That’s why he thought so highly of me—or didn’t think highly of me at all, as the case may be. I’m here, now that was Ursula, which meant a lot to me. She was starting to frustrate me with all her happy smiles and blushing when she posted herself answering questions on facebook. I wanted to “turn her out” but I couldn’t imagine it, which made it frustrating. In fact I could remember or imagine very little without wanting to degrade someone, which I wasn’t programmed to do—not anymore, since I’d gotten my life together. Anger and hatred no longer turned me on, and, because of that, I needed something to inspire me—or, that is to say, I needed enough self-confidence to treat Ursula the same way I would treat any woman that I might find myself attracted to—because of their looks, and, perhaps, because they didn’t have a brain.
So I switched back to my songwriter uncle—not the pot smoker friend he sometimes represented, and he said something that I couldn’t understand. then, at least, i think he said: you don’t love me; and i wanted to say, yes, that’s true; but then I got the impression that he actually represented someone from the future, someone that, somehow, I understood to be a man. He wasn’t, specifically, the realistic version of my famous pot smoker friend; i had the actual pot smoker friend in my head already, separate from others, and he represented himself, pretty much, now that I no longer, when it came to him, needed to offset the starshine with familiarity and conceit. So what did my pot-smoker friend have to say? He said, you have the woman of my dreams, which was kind of funny, because i gathered, by that, he meant that Ursula was the woman of his dreams, and, for all I knew, maybe she was—even if he was getting on in years, and might not, given his former lifestyle, be around for much longer.
You’re suspended in time, Ursula said; Was I? In what way? Did she mean that, at 48 books and 800 paintings I was going in a direction that would leave me remembered? I believed that, anyhow. I guess she was just making an observation—but I think she might also have been saying, “You’re out of my league.” But I begged to differ because, in fact, I couldn’t imagine someone wanting me, desiring me, lusting after me—I couldn’t conjure the image—and, as such, I not only felt that I was inadequate—I was inadequate. At least when it comes to a sexual relationship, a life lived in the outside world, a world that would do me wrong. I can protect you and that might have been the case, but I couldn’t believe that she would actually want to do that—i came with my creations; you couldn’t divide me from that—and that meant that yes, i might be able to look after myself financially if I live a modest life, but could I look after myself if I lived alone—in isolation? Without the company of others? Hence my wishes not to separate myself from my family—such that I only saw them infrequently—not enough to keep me from losing touch with reality, if, that is, i found myself without company.
Such as, alas, the love of my life. But, for now, I had to wonder—how would i react if she ever cut all that beautiful long hair? That was important to me; hence, if she cut her hair, it would have been an affront—a test, and, because of that, yes, there were possibilities that our love would not stand the test of time. I don’t know who would be the most petty—me for judging her based on her appearance, or her for needing me to accept her no matter what—especially if the outside wasn’t what it used to be, and she saw no reason, anymore, to keep it up. All that beautiful hair really mattered, though. It made her gorgeous. then my wine drinker uncle said something that I couldn’t understand, which he followed up with: “You keep me like a kept woman.” He was obviously frustrated that I hadn’t been devoting a little time every day to my songwriting, which, I know, is important, but, of late, I’d been working for a while on one thing, and then catching up at something else the next day. Everything wasn’t exactly clockwork, which is fine, some of the time—but I have to make sure that I stick with everything, or else something might run the risk of being ignored, something that I needed to be remembered fondly, and with great respect.