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.

   Do tell, what awaits?  Jack Daniels attacked Iran, and, although Iran was not a good country, going to war with them was a mistake, especially considering how much war costs.  But Jack was bound and determined to do whatever he had to do to keep what he was doing in the news cycle, so that people might overlook his past—and a history of sexual assault that, spent on minors, could ruin him.  Now, I know one reason Ursula was suffering—the The New York Times—which, sadly, depended a little too much on the wealthy, wanted to remove Ursula from the 2028 presidential race, considering that she, undoubtedly, would punish the rich for hording the wealth that meant, in the case of health insurance, anyhow, life or death circumstances for all too many Americans.

    I was back to myself, back on schedule.  how do you do it?  In fact I was facing a conundrum.  I don’t think I could afford to do two paintings a day, and, today, I did.  That was because the first painting looked complete already without much time having passed.  I wasn’t going to ruin a good painting by overworking it, but I wanted to paint for a longer amount of time than I had, so i did another one, and I thought: “how am i going to afford this, and where am I going to put them all?  I needed a dealer that could sell my work—and yet, as we all know, it’s not incredibly likely that my paintings are going to sell any time soon, if ever.  But I had to push on, didn’t I?  I had to go above and beyond the call of duty, didn’t I?  I couldn’t just say, “I’m only going to paint for an hour, and that’s it!”  No, I had to consider:  “I have to paint for two hours at least, don’t I?” 

   Things had cooled off a little—I’d finally had a bowel movement that accounted for the fact that I hadn’t had a proper bowel movement in a shameful amount of time; I had to dig it out of the toilet, of course, and dump it in the back yard—which is why, upon further study, I was switching from psyllium husk to a stool softener; clearly, the psyllium husk wasn’t doing what I’d hoped—moving the stool along so it wouldn’t sit around for so long.  Now I was thinking: great, now that I’m not adding mass to my stool, I should have a bowel movement every three or four days as opposed to five or seven—and who knows, the stool softener might cut that in half, so that, well, I’d be going as often as I used to go in high-school—about every other day.  That, at least, was the endgame, and, along with my sexual dysfunction, the reason for getting off risperidone, even though, as far as my thinking disorder goes, it worked as well as any reasonable person might’ve hoped.

  Well, here we were, in some deeper realm of analytic thought, concerning ourself with mathematical stimulus, trying to prove the existence of heaven.  That’s what everybody would like to do, I think, but most people can’t understand anything but love for one another; if told them that math is love they’d say it’s over their heads—as if they didn’t want to think about going to heaven, even if it meant, in thinking about it, you increased your chances of getting there.  I’ll be a doctor one day, but this came from someone else, someone I knew only a little, from the church, and, once or twice, his appearance, along with two missionaries, at our dinner table.  The root of that—the person I thought of after I overheard that, was Ursula—I wondered, even, if she said it.  What was she doing?  “Did you say that?”

Here I was, talking to Ursula, having defined myself—through a respectable test, the Storms Sexuality Axis test, to be seventy percent heterosexual and thirty percent homosexual. So all the second guessing myself and overthinking of whether or not I’m homosexual had to stop—it had been going on for too long. this pleased Ursula, since, ac-cording to her, I was too straight to be gay, which is exactly what the test said. So good—I was straight enough to deny being gay—only i didn’t want to deny being gay, which is why I call myself queer and say that I don’t fit any category—I do it for strategic reasons, to silence all the people that, out of hate, would argue that I’m gay, (because of my now prior confusion and my sexual dysfunction). Now that my confidence was growing—I’d gone on misleading both myself and others enough, yes; but also, yes, I was thirty percent gay, and that was important to me—enough to celebrate in my writing since, after all, being thirty percent gay is really quite beautiful, if you’re not a jerk.