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I wish I could automate every fader, everywhere. Or at least yours.Isn't it funny how nothing works out all at once? See, this last while has been the worst while in the history of whiles. I may exaggerate, but I can do that here. Everything is so wrong and terribly timed. When she talks to me I make my eyes all clean and clear, and I even smile, but in the middle of the dark I think I hate her for making me feel responsible for her safety and her health and refusing to make any sense that I know how to understand. Then the other one surfaces and I crumble a little bit. Charles and I both, we slump foolishly in the corner while the polite stranger mops the floors. It's at moments like this that Jackpot can be counted on, and he holds my hand over the phone, and we're the little kids in the photographs. He tells me to run away, and I know he's right, but I have to ask anyway, "What's going to happen to her?" Late afternoon, and he's on a parkbench in mid-town Manhattan, and I'm sitting knees to chin in Southeastern Queens, both looking at nothing and wondering, "What's going to happen to her?"Gosh, that's mopey, isn't it? A nice thing is that when I don't eat and I don't sleep and I'm running around all of the time fixing problems for someone who doesn't seem to understand what the big deal is, something interesting happens. Everywhere I go, I can't believe how pretty everything is, the buildings and the faces and the puddles and the trees and everything. I stood at the corner waiting for the light to change, and the clouds passing over the top of the Masonic Hall nearly made me tip over into Sixth Avenue, that's how good they were. When I walk I turn the volume on my walkman all the way up, and when I'm sad shuffle is especially nice to me, and I feel like I'm walking around in a dream. It's as though I can see everything and nothing can see me, and the mouths of people around me move, but all I hear is the music I love best. This morning when I was still not sleeping I saw the sky get light and then dark again and then there was thunder getting louder and louder, and then rain, rain, rain, and finally I could sleep and it was so, so nice. Even now it's sort of dark out and the hems of my pant legs are damp against my ankles from going to get the newspaper in a too thin tee shirt and flip flops, and boy has it gotten cold around here... Thank goodness for the Saturday paper. Once I make it through some more of what escaped me over the past seven or eight days, it will be there waiting for me, perfect as always.
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