Thinking again about the sex party thing, hoping that I don’t sound judgmental about the matter. I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I am certain it is not for me, and I am not sure how to interpret the invitation, which came across as completely random but sincere.

Wow, a song on the jukebox here just used the words “detachable penis”. In high school I had a dream that one of the other kids in the class had a removable penis. My friends reminded me of this dream for years to come, not to make fun but to honor the memory of a dream none of them had the mental guts to have themselves, or to talk about if they actually did have that dream.

I got close to a finished product for the “too busy to die” story. I came up with what I think is a unique conceit. The person who is too busy to die is Mrs. Jones. She has a son with whom she rarely communicates. He essentially fired her as a mother, as best one can actually do that. She was awful to him. Among the indignities he suffered under her parentage was that he was only allowed to call her “Mrs. Jones.” He never knew her first or middle name until after her death. I think that’s a pretty cruel bit of mothering, though it could be interpreted as harmless eccentricity. In the story she telephones her son, who is now in his fifties, with the intent of shooting herself while he listens. She does this. I’m afraid that a story about a cruel and suicidal mother will somehow be interepreted as coming from real life, but that’s not true. My mother was not cruel. Well, yes she was, in her ways, but not anything like the woman in this story. It was my mother’s mother who was the horrible excuse for a person, and my father’s mother was said to be not much better. As my friend T.’s mother once said to me, of all the things you can do in life that require a license it seems like parenting should be one of them. Maybe that’s how this guy fires his mother: She has no license, or her license expired. Hah.

I want to finish the story tonight so the therapist can read it tomorrow. She’s my new deadline.

…

I forgot why I titled this story “Beautiful”.

…

It’s the next day. I am early to the therapist. Sitting in the Empire State Building Starbucks. Woke up with anxiety like I have not experienced in a few weeks. I slept 12 hours again. That’s the third time this week. Might take a pill later, or might just drink it down.

Somebody on the bridge today scared the shit out of me. I guess this is just a thing he does. Riding his bike slowly he grabbed me by the arm and said a word. I don’t know what the word was. I screamed. Loudly. He laughed and laughed. He got the reaction he wanted, I guess. He actually seemed like a nice guy. He kept riding onward, looking back at me and laughing, holding up his hand in what I think was a conciliatory thumbs up gesture. After a few moments I managed to laugh it off, and I returned the thumbs up gesture to him, even though I didn’t really want to.

I had been listening to a Bruce Springsteen album that I found on my iPod. I had never heard of it. “Before the Fame” is the title. I get to the second and third songs and I started thinking “This is really horrible.” He sounded sick and the songs made barely any sense. It was actually making me kind of nauseous. Bad music can have that affect on me. But stuff this bad from freakiin’ Bruce? I mean he’s had his duds, to be sure, and I do not claim to know the canon as well as others certainly do. but this shit was just horrible.

So I did a search on my phone and was relieved to find this review, which essentially says everything I was thinking about these songs, save for the fact that I never got through most of them. Bruce apparently was vehement about not wanting this stuff released. It’s just early demo crap that sounds like stream of consciousness drek more than coherent songwriting. Ah well, at least my pop music critical tastes are strong.