Visiting in New York

The grass is greener in Minnesota, of course. My bout of depression is and is not clearing by way of travel to see (eight) important friends. I am and am not getting married any time soon as threatened or promised. We can and cannot live well together even for a weekend. It is as Dr. Abuzzahab said of poets -- they are eccentric. We are acting too lazy to take a shower. I am reading Louise Bogan's letters and poetry. Certainly, there is no sex. I've thought about whether sex matters and if so, how much. If it doesn't matter at all, I wasted my youth. If it matters normally, then I miss it. Does it matter compared to eating? I see sex and food as similar, sex as more like food than like drug.

We are drinking only very little. I celebrated my 10th anniversary since joining AA, the end of habitual drunkenness. I had stopped drinking on Father's Day. I liked tipsiness, not drunkenness. Those days of vodka alone are fortunately long past. I have taken care of alcoholics, though, when I might have hid from them in AA meetings or at the Church -- alcoholics don't go there!

I stopped going to AA seven years ago, but I didn't stop meeting members, who found me on internet dating websites (I took down my profiles). Or I met them in league with our past lives. Our real or past lives, now that we are aging and fearing poverty and infirmity, still matter more to us. Still, I loved my four internet power dates. Those didn't lead to relationships because I am too poor to attract a professional middle-class man my age or older (my height or taller). Plus, they are all divorced with children, and I'm searching for a role. This 4-year hope (NY) is of surviving disparities with one whose suffering is too noticeable -- he walks with a cane -- to let him recognize life. We both like service people, the paid courteous. He has a civil libertarian's fear of AA and rejects spiritual practice. I miss having a spiritual practice.

I need to start something. Look, this year four editors contacted me about poems. Yesterday, at lunch with BJ and TS, we saw Richard Howard. It was at Knickerbocker's. Hello, we said.