SHOULDERING OUR BOLDER
Perhaps you are feeling that we are neglecting you. Perhaps you feel we’ve been backsliding. Perhaps your eyes slide down our paltry posts of the last weeks and you sneer at what you imagine to be our indolence. Our laziness. Our lack of fiber.
Imagine, though, gentle reader, how our friends feel. How our loved ones feel. How our brother feels. Because we at Mango Pudding Blues have been as sullen with our loved ones as we have been with you. We at Mango Pudding Blues have been as elusive, as erratic, as evasive with them as we are with you.
No, we have not been giving you our all. Instead, we have been mostly shouldering our boulder up the hill, the same hill, every day, day after day, sweating, cursing, complaining, pushing and kicking and humping that son of a bitch up the hill. Every day. And every day it’s back at the bottom. You know?
You know?
But okay. Maybe you want something. Some news. Something about what we’re up to. Something personal. Okay: We’re tense. We get it in our shoulders and neck. Okay. Also, we have felt compelled to hoard money against an uncertain future. Yes. And we bought a lottery ticket recently, but have not pulled it, dog-eared, from our wallet to see if it’s the winner. Yes. What else?We are trying to learn, from a beginner’s fake book, to play the Gershwins’ Love is Here to Stay on the piano. Okay. We recently decided not to go to New York for a long weekend. Yes. A christmas flight to Barbados could cost near one thousand dollars. Yes. We are trying to find a new inner quiet and humility. Uh-huh. We just finished watching, with the Killer, the first season of Six Feet Under. We recommend it. We got our teeth cleaned today. We have a boy hygienist, and a female dentist who is astonishingly good-looking in a tall, blonde, gap-toothed European kind of way. Yes. We loved Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, but don’t generally like his writing. Yet. Okay. Largo al factotum della città, the hokey “Figaro” aria from Rossini’s Barber of Seville has thrilled us more than any pop, rock or jazz song from the last year, and we don’t know whether to be ashamed or thrilled by this. Yes. We have a horrible urge to buy a new suit we saw, but we hardly ever wear the suits we already own. We are nearing a total breakdown. Or not. The gamelan is taking too much of our time. We are going to go to a sushi class. We are trying to apply to our whole life the advice Terrence McKenna gave about approaching the psychedelic experience; “Breathe. And pay attention.”
