i want to be the president: i don’t care about anything else   but that wasn’t true, or, if it was, she meant that everything she does is consistent with a presidential arc.  Anna Karenina was back to asking me all kinds of questions that were difficult to answer, and I answered them, and I

     don’t you love me anymore?  i just want you to look past what you perceive as hunger; immerse yourself in your work.  but, as is often the case, in order to do the really fun things that we want to do, we have to build up to it with a series of seemingly inconsequential

     you seem too happy to be devastated—that was my assessment of how Anna Karenina was handling the likelihood that she would be the next president.  that was all well and good, and it was great to see her feeling good.  Of course i still suspected that things could get a little better for her—she

     i was tuning into AOC and various things were passing through my head but i couldn’t make much sense of what was happening—something about wolf-son, healthcare—a lot about healthcare, actually, and then she said, “i don’t mean to ignore you; so i got to wondering: what if AOC was thinking about things that were

     AOC was asking about Finnegan’s Wake; did you really read it, and i said, yes, i did, and i actually recorded it—and then felt bad about it for various reasons (i had better things to do than make a recording of me reading Finnegan’s wake—I don’t even like James Joyce; I think he’s boring,

     AOC was saying something now, about a car—i know she’d gotten a car several years ago but i don’t know if she still had one.  She could’ve been getting rides everywhere, now—I don’t know.  But what did she want to say about a car?  That it’s working?  And what did you mean by that? 

     So the lines were blurring between my AOC and the AOC that went by the name of Alex—and, in the company of Bernie Sanders (an outspoken Senator), Alexandria.  I had pretty much defined my AOC—my orphan from the future—as both looking and sounding exactly like the real flesh and blood AOC that I called

11    this love was going to short circuit my brain   i’d blow a fuse, trying, in vain, to inform myself of myself in such a way that i could achieve greater and greater echelons of happiness—not to mention explain myself in such a way that people could understand me—or at least praise me.      

     where are you headed now?  i’m going to my grave   “but there’s a lot of things that can happen in between that, right?”  And there were: for example: i could marry someone else.  I don’t know if i was trying to make Alexandria jealous or what, but I told her (just like I was

     maybe you want to be at the center of everything, and so you turn on your heels and say, “this is not the end of everything,” or something like that, when what you really mean is, “this is a little hard to believe,” and you’d be right, some things, such as life after death