Just caught the headline that prince is dead. Only 57. No cause published yet. Wow. Alwyas thought of him as one of the good guys, and I thought he was clean of drugs and shit but maybe I was wrong about that. Best Super bowl halftime show ever, but impossible to find even on Uenet on account of how vigorously he and his people scrubbed the Internet of anything of his that was pirated.

At the TT again, where my secret seems to be out. A dozen or so people are here, and only one table was left for me.

Thinking about the chicken bone poem. Going to end it with a stated desire   not to be creamted or flushed down the toilet. No, I want my bones savagely chopped into pieces, the meat of my muscles left clinging to them, and all that matter scattered on the Queensboro Bridge, where the ants and insects will disperse of them.

Thinking about my mother again, ahead of therapy session. Remembering for some reason her chagrin when she found a box full of letters that she and my father wrote to each other before they were married. I never read them, and I wonder if they still exist. She was reading them some 25 years after they were married, and a year or so after they had separated. She described her writing as cloying. She said she sounded like a fucking child kissing up to a teaccher or parent. She simply did not recognize herself from these letters, which represented a significant part of their courtship.

I think about this now because I sometimes pass by old pictures of her, from before I was born. It is as true now as it ever was that I never knew that woman but seeing her in the early 1960s is like seeing someone who never existed, as far as my understanding of things extends. I would also be curious what my father’s letters sounded like. Was he as boastful of his dubious achievements in youth as he was in old age? Probably so. He would brag about people he knew and places he had been, leaving me unable to even consider a followup question because I could not understand why he bothered to tell me.

I think my mother knew he was gay. I think she at least suspected. I wish I had told her, but in the aftershock of the suicide I pompously took it upon myself to shield her from this horrifying revelation. I did not want her thinking she had wasted not just 20+ years of marriage but also her sexuality, which never cooled even into her later years.

There is a set of pictures of them from 1959 (I think). They are having a picnic somewhere outside of Brussels, I believe. It looks idyllic but I see tension and unease, such as would be consistent with the zeitgeist of the era. Men were men, women were women, and what woman wouldn’t want to marry into a  military union, one which guaranteed world travel and reasonable financial security absent anything approaching consummate wealth.

Later years would reveal that virtually every military couple they knew in Laos and Ghana had divorced, and that the percentage of military divorces was something like 80%. I imagine the drama of all that world travel to dangerous and exotic locations played into a settling in of boredom after the tours of duty ended and they followed the routine path to a house in the suburbs.

I think of Lady Bird Johnson, when asked why she stuck with LBJ knowing full well he was a womanizing philanderer. She said she was intoxicated by the travel and the unique opportunity to see people and places that no one else ever would. I don’t know how acceptable a response that really is. I would want to hear the sound of her voice as she said it, mining it for weakness or vibrations.

I wonder if she and LBJ exchanged letters before their wedding, and what those voices sounded like 20 years later.

I hve had reason of late to scour through old e-mails, looking for addresses and names from years ago. Certain of my outgoing e-mails read like disembodied swallows of thought.