pounding Dr. Pepper, pounding sparkling water, trying to get this woman that I wanted to have a baby with out of my mind—just the mere fact that I wanted so badly to get her pregnant betrayed the impossibility of a relationship. You just don’t talk about things like that until you’ve given somebody—and where they are, and what they want, by choice—a chance. wild thoughts went through my mind—but I was mainly worried about my music, right now. My jazz piece had been in review for almost a month, and i wanted so badly for it to hurry up and be complete—distributed and playable. I wanted to listen to it, for heaven’s sake. Don’t know why it was taking so long—don’t know why it was taking me so long—to be discovered, that is, since, in my mind, well, everything I did was good enough to attract a buttload of attention.
But no! things didn’t work like that, especially not for me. My greatest strength was my ability to continue working, relentlessly, when nobody formally recognized the quality of my work. It was a real bummer sometimes, but I also knew that, because of that, if I was discovered, interest would grow multiplicatively. I was so ambitious i wanted to grab the world by the balls and never let them go. I wanted total world domination. I always had. So I worked—I worked like a dog; it was interesting to me, anyhow—i needed to do it to be ok—not just for the sake of my rise to power, but for the sake of how my heart and mind processed the person that I was becoming—and their relationship with the universe, and, also, if there is a God, with God, too. Hold fire, anyhow, as Henry James might say. People get a whiff of your ambition, and they feel like an idiot to think that you could be for real, if, that is, you could get the right people behind you, people that stood to make money and praise if you made money and praise, people that you could work for and people that could work for you.
But I had this fear that my Jazz piece would be rejected for some reason. It was a little like getting tested for AIDS, in my case, anyhow—the case in which, well, you hadn’t been around that much, and you were kind of paranoid, but, nevertheless, you’d had unprotected sex and you wanted to be sure. So you go, and it’s a nightmare. all kinds of scenarios go through your head. It’s a fucking nightmare. And how often are you supposed to get tested, really? I mean, not if you’re a sex worker, but if your just an average person (relatively speaking) that is both single and sexually active? Or has been, with more than one person, over the course of what? A year? That’s what I determined to be a healthy and respectful amount of time. Otherwise you’d go nuts, or, in fact, you might give it to somebody else.
Oh, my Ursula. What would she say to me? You tell somebody you’re LGBTQ and the first thing they say, if you’re a man, is, “have you been tested yet? when?” Well, maybe that’s not always the case—i just ended up dating a woman that was a bad person, someone that i thought was a good person because they were associated with an art teacher, but, in fact, I also thought this art teacher was a bad person. They were the type of people that would praise you, but, at the same time, they were bigots, and that made them bad people. But i wouldn’t hold it against Ursula if she asked me if i’d been tested. I might, however, hold it against her if she didn’t get herself tested. What about that? Timing played a role in this too; you don’t ask somebody if they have AIDS when they tell you that they’re attracted to men. That’s not the first thing that should come out of your mouth. You just weren’t supposed to have sex with them yet—you were supposed to give them a chance—not because you wouldn’t dump them if they were HIV positive, but because homosexuality, now a days, should not, first and foremost, be associated with death. It’s far too beautiful for that.
Ursula, my Ursula—Norway blond wasn’t turning me on—at least not the person I associated her with, and why would she? I don’t know her that well, and, frankly, if past experience means anything, she’s probably not the best person in the world. What I mean by that is this: Does she really think that I am going to uproot my life to meet, perchance, in a dark alley, and fuck her brains out? But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. And then again, maybe i’m not, since, as it happens, I don’t know if she was out of town, or what, but she definitely wasn’t showering me with attention the way she, at one point, did—well, maybe she didn’t shower me with attention, except she kind of did, but maybe she did that with everybody, and that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? She made me think that I was as special as she thought i was—but what was really going on? She thought she stood to gain from the relationship, didn’t she? Otherwise where was she? Where was Norway blond? Did she even exist? And yet I could hear her voice—so I was thankful for that. But when it came to having sex, well, i don’t even know why I’m saying this, because sex with Norway blond was impossible.
I’m sure she was around; she was, kind of, she got in touch every now and then. Whatever. People think you’re something great, don’t they, until they realize that you’re actually doing it—and nothing, beyond doing it yourself, which is something that these people characteristically don’t do, is going to happen. You’re not going to automatically enter the kingdom of heaven—or get connected to someone that could make you famous—that could discover you. That doesn’t happen—people don’t have time. They have to work jobs—jobs that don’t pay enough and take up far too much of their time. I sympathize. I know what working a job did to me. It degraded me until there was nothing left but fear and hatred. Now, she could hear me, now; I think she was trying to speak to me from across the bulk. I guess I should apologize for saying that sex with Norway blond was impossible, but, at this point, well, what was the point?
I wish i had a real person that I could talk to in the same way that I used to talk to Ocasio-Cortez. But I didn’t, and, because of that, I couldn’t think about them when I took messages to and from my back. I hated it—but, you know, I was so happy for Ocasio-Cortez. How could I hold it against her if she had no way of knowing me—if she had no desire to be with me—if she didn’t like me all the more because of how i felt about her—and how, well, I wanted her to be mine—except, I didn’t, did I? I didn’t want that; I couldn’t change my routine that much—my work, here, was too important. I didn’t want to be with Ocasio-Cortez until I could afford to live my life off money that I made—or money that, spoiler alert—the government gave me to start a family. To be with someone in a way that I can’t be. So no, i don’t want Ocasio-Cortez, and she doesn’t want me. She wants her boyfriend—and my greatest satisfaction, at this point, is simply to say that I am the same person as him. We’ll merge into one person, in the life to come.
But you might think: when two spirits combine, what happens? Do they lose their memories? Do they no longer recognize themselves? How could they? Do they somehow get bigger? And the answer is that we are all made up of various parts—some of them are shared with others, they overlap—and some don’t. But the truth is we interfere for a bit—somethings get cancelled or realized as dream material, and other things resonate. They constructively interfere. But what do I think? That I will be the dominant person if i merge with another person—the boyfriends of Norway blond, for example? Well, yes, but not exactly. The truth is that, in being conscious of many things, I am also conscious of many things in the afterlife. I am conscious of him already, in many ways, and, when i die, he’s already a part of me. When he dies, he is awake, in me, sometimes, and, as such, a part of my consciousness. I think of him and he thinks of me. But, at other times, he is also asleep, and, when that happens, all the bad things that happened in our lives cancel out—the good things resonate, and, we are able to focus on something new, together.