Shame on you!  You mentioned me!  Well, i’d just figured out that an italic sentence should be punctuated with an italics punctuation mark, but, you know what?  Screw that—I wasn’t going back to fix it; so I tell myself, I’m a painter, and it’s important to me to show a little of the process in the finished piece—such as well, how you don’t care sometimes if something looks unfinished or a little daring.  I know, though, who do I think I am?  That I can play fast and loose with the laws of the English language?  But anyhow—what did she expect?  That I’d never mention this person, when, after all, I projected that voice on a daily basis?  But I know what she was getting at.  I was only going to make myself look crazy, or, possibly, I was going a little crazy, because I should know better than to joke about something in the hope that once people get used to the joke it will feel normal to them and then you can get away with things for real.

this is horse-shit, my father said, also known as Mozart.  I’d been working on a classical piece—violin, cello, and piano—but I don’t think he was talking about that.  I think he was talking about my country and how everybody was forced to spend so much time separated from their families because they had to work all the time.  Now, you know what you want, Ursula said, and, indeed, I still wanted her.  I had my fingers crossed that I’d get my sexual dysfunction fixed, and, when I did, I was sure that my confidence would get a boost, and, then, well, I’d be ready for whoever the real person behind Ursula the politician was: (It was becoming increasingly apparent that I’d never be with Ursula the politician, but I intended to stick with her).  So what did the person behind Ursula look like?  Given my hatred for random blond idiots, she was probably blond—since we’re often attracted to what we have a beef with.

     what are you cooking up now?  then my pot smoker friend said something, but I couldn’t understand him.  then he said, now.  As if, at this time of my life, everything about me was beginning right now.  Someone unknown said, “i’m trying to stave off disaster,” and it sounded kind of like my default narrator.  Now you’re going to try this, my pot smoker friend said  –  and I’m going tell you I revolutionized pottery, my smoker friend said.  I didn’t really care.  I didn’t really care about them—or anything they were saying, at least not in this moment, except for me, and I was a little irked by me because he refused to let me function with a decent level of dopamine and testosterone in my body.  I got a whiff of the other side, last night, though, as I forgot to take my medicine, and I woke up, unable to get back to sleep, keeping time with my foot, and wondering what was going on.  Around 5 I got up to take my morning meds, and I saw that I hadn’t taken my evening meds, so i took half of them, went back to bed for an hour, and felt fine.

    How can you love Him, without me?  Ah, that was a good question, for I felt no great love for Jesus—he was a figurehead that had no physical meaning for me; I even doubted that he ever existed—even as a plain old man.  But I know what she was getting at—she was talking about a more general and simultaneously private Him, that man, in the next life, that I am a shadow of, and privy to.  In that sense I did love Him, so, if that’s what she meant, I needed to correct her—but how could I do that without making it sound like I worship myself?  But, you know, who cares?  I believe that the man I answer to is me, living on a higher plane, at the same time that I, for now, am duking it out in this dimension.  So back to her question:  How can you love Him, without me?  It was almost like I was posing the question to myself, and, at one time, the question would’ve proved impossible to answer, since that person (me) remained undefined.

    Too bum tired to work on the Riemann hypothesis?  Yeah, I’d worked on it all morning; got in a little over my head, but I’ll sort it out when I’m fresh, tomorrow, and I’ve got the stamina to make sense out of many different tangents—all circling this idea that prime frequencies and zero frequencies coordinating force the zeros to be on the critical line—an idea that, apparently, may not be entirely new; but maybe i’m getting ahead of myself; I needed to go about this carefully, which meant, well, I had time for Ursula, right here and right now.  that’s good to hear.  I thought so, too, although I don’t know what we had to talk about—so I considered, maybe we could work together to talk to someone else, like the next Mozart, or something.  Right now he’s got those violins going a mile a minute; he’s full of youthful vigor—dying around the same time I finally got myself together and proved able to make all the art that I’ve made over the last ten years.  I’ve been making up for lost time.