i’m not going to eat a whole pizza by myself  no, of course not, something had to be done about that.  An invitation?  Possibly, unless she was talking to her live-in lover, and i was just hearing the echo of it pass through her mind.  But I think she recognized a certain pitch, when […]

12      It had been a few days, now, that I’d been away from our usual appointment; my scotch uncle and i had been working on the Riemann hypothesis, and, get this, we were making music together, too.  Or was it some other uncle making music—perhaps the lung-cancer uncle—the wine drinker?  I didn’t know, for

     My crash course in music theory was going well, and, although I’d never be a performer that memorized something—or traveled around on a tour, it was, I discovered, possible to record my voice saying and or speaking the lyrics that went with my songs.  For now I just wanted to focus on learning and

     you changed your pattern?  a little; yes, I was starting the day often enough with a love poem, a sonnet, and a general poem, if not an installment of a book-length poem, followed by song-writing, followed by math and physics (for a lesser amount of time), followed by a painting, followed by this book;

     i could see nothing but Ursula counting off a list of organizations that she was recommending people join; she was so down to earth, and personable, that i watched her for a few minutes, when, normally, i wouldn’t—because, if I did, it might mess up my relationship with the real Ursula, the one I

     So many things were happening all around me—a whole new world was opening, and i didn’t know how I was going to keep up.  Get up earlier?  Work more hours?  But in general i seemed to need ten hours of sleep.  That meant, for me, sleeping from about 8:30 to 6:30.  But i’d woken

     I’d discovered something—something that explained thinking, as I had, a little, over the last couple days, about cigarettes.  I started writing songs that met my standard as to what a good song can be.  Now, i’ll probably never play a musical instrument since i spend so much time doing other things—but I’d played around

     the power hadn’t gone off yet—but I was in for another 20 hours of danger.  it was cold—getting outside to paint was going to take a little burst of will-power, but doing a painting was a priority.  How else was i going to spend my time?  Since, as it happens, i finished the first

     i was feeling a little on edge because there was supposed to be an ice-storm tonight and the power was expected to go out, possibly for a few days.  What in the world was I going to do with myself if the power went out?  could i sleep fourteen hours, write a little poetry,

11      i won’t reveal their codewords—but something had changed, this morning, when I was writing my various poems; the men i was using to sound out the consonants—my smoker friend, my stomach cancer uncle, and my scotch uncle all started doing the vowels, and Ursula started doing the consonants.  That meant I concentrated a