Punctuate

My "husband" retorts with misogyny; he commits racial slurs to the air of the apartment where we live. We aren't married, as I keep telling myself, as I told myself then about men I hadn't married then, who weren't misogynist or racist, even when drunk. Men then were in our twenties and thirties. My favorite men were 33. They were my heroes. They ran off with my girlfriend, the same girlfriend, twice. When I was 33, my favorite men were 42 and 46. My favorite men now are 60 and 63. This "husband" I wish I could change is 51, but he says he's 60. Friends say he looks 65. He slurs everyone. He slurs all of humankind and pets. He insults male pets by not using their names, by calling them "his highness"; he calls "poor" men "dumbos" and "fatsos," and he calls women "her highness" to be polite, otherwise cunt: old cunt, dumb cunt, monkey cunt. He keeps it up for 16 hours in one day. One of my friends says it's due to his illness that he hates so openly when he's drunk, but I know that's when he lies most. Nothing he says drunk is reliable. I think it's being awake that bothers him. Being awake coincides with being drunk. He's kind in his sleep or when talking with certain men or when talking with men in his sleep or early in the morning before he drinks. I explain it that way.

My Republican summer fiance slurred no one politically except all mental cases (he himself had police force "combat" PTSD) and O.J. He had covered the Manson trial as a young radio reporter. He called the outcome of the O.J. trial -- that O.J. trial -- "murder for a fee."

I was writing gaily at this weblog during the month of October, quietly and gaily something about men who don't love enough in their sacred, guarded places, places everywhere that resemble the worlds of finance and business, until I had an attack of self-consciousness. What was exposed were the highs and lows of writing, the elation of inspiration, the clumsiness of not knowing the effect of the writing, yet the fear of patriarchy, the hierarchy of the literary marketplace, the hierarchy of the academy. Knowing that hiding that is adequate in poetry.

I-dot-I-dot-ippi

A friend feels that she has sacred, dark places that after years of self-probing only an expensive man psychiatrist could understand. She feels that I have obvious self-inflicted wounds that any team of nuns could smudge with a pillow.