Oh, George.

What farce our middle years. After a week of various hysteria, including my own in a public park, I decided to spend the day alone. I boiled up a mug of Burdock tea (is there nothing I will not do for my bowels), and browsed my eighteenth century copy of Ficino and yet, while curious to know what my Renaissance master has to say on the nature of grief, I was also aware of my breath, shallow and slight, a state I increasingly felt could only be resolved by a thrashing on the back of my upper thighs. I was aware that Helen's uncertain health lent her an unwarranted power and, therefore, hoping to balance this and resolve the tension in my lungs, I lay aside my Ficino and put in a few calls, finally making an appointment for myself tomorrow, along the coast, with a mistress who, if I remember correctly, used to work in a pet shop. She had a voice as hard as diamond.

I called Thom. We discussed his physics homework and after, on a whim, I projected, as fathers and sons tend to, all our dilemmas onto the astronomical and, thereby, asked what he knew of how the planets revolve around the sun. His answer nearly made me cry. So, lifting us onto firmer ground we then made plans to travel to Arsenal for monday night. Yet it was later, in the supermarket, seeing George and his new girlfriend in the alcohol aisle, that the uncertain emotion in my chest cohered into an obscene and horrible guffaw as I saw George's girlfriend was hardly more than a teenager, a Thai bride, in fact, and the innocence on the face of my friend as he pottered around with his girl was so profound, I had to depart the shop and unsure if it was misery for us both or admiration for him, I could do nothing but stagger home, breathing deeply, laughing like a loon.

Oh, George.