Save the Last Post for Meme

“Are you done with Patti?”

Have you forgotten you asked me this question? Granted: it was weeks ago, you've actually GOT a life and as per usual I couldn't come up with an answer since I hadn't foreseen the question, because I truly foresee nothing and at the moment my intellectual capacity was occupied by a game of tug o' war with an Airedale. Breath and the idea sank in. Some people, when they ask you questions, it doesn't matter what you say if anything. "I'm not trying to pressure you or anything," you continued, exerting all your will to modulate the genetic rat-a-tat effect of your speech once the starting gun fires. "I just don't know if this has run its course, especially for you, I mean, not living in South Jersey like I do, and you've probably got projects of your own you want to focus on by now--"

"Yeah, right." I plopped down in my chair and wrapped the knotted pants leg over the Airedale's eyes. She flipped it off, seized it between her maloccluded jaws and broke its neck. That was that. "No, I know what you mean. It’ll be a year in October. And, like ever since we decided to write about her, Patti’s just gotten so damn trendy . . . I mean, she's everywhere now--"

"Yeah, I'm always ahead of the culture curve that way." You laughed your choppy little laugh. "But it's kind of good for us too, right?"

My hair was slipping into my eyes, the gray piece I wish looked like Susan Sontag's streamer but instead just makes me look more and more like my negative destiny every year ("You get hair cut, put on some make-up, you could be an attractive lady," my physiatrist informed me during my second visit to be treated for neck pain; this was minutes after he had read my body and given away the last chapter to me, in which should I pursue my lifelong refusal to open up and admit whatever it is that I'm secretly afraid of, I will lose even THIS pathetic grip and wind up . . . "a Cat Lady").

I sat in my chair looking at the Airedale and thinking of mean things to say. There was Patti Smith, interviewed in the special "Fashion Rocks" magazine put out by the folks who Define, refine and fact check our taste and our opinions every weeks (with cartoons, minus some double issues for Fiction, Food and Travel--these editions I've always found make excellent sources of collage material), telling how it feels to be on the tour bus “rumpled" (just like back in the Field Marshall days) but "in beautiful clothes” supplied by a fashion designer fan who started sending her shirts gratis. Then our Patti let Annie Liebovitz take a (gorgeous) photo of her and the (striking in a goinng-through-her-kate-moss-phase way) aforesaid designer to run with the puff piece in “Fashion Rocks”, possibly the most navel-fixated product the New Yorker has ever spawned. And that’s going some.

Oh, okay, Patti. Y' still rock. Y're severely beautiful. You never stopped writing. "You know more than I know, you know more than I know, You know more than I know" (John Cale).

"If you wanna get down/ down on the ground / Cocaine" (J.J. Cale--no, not Eric Clapton.)

"Baby got big and baby got bigger . . . " (PS, "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger")

Maybe I just can't keep up? Or maybe aliens picked me up on some North Carolina country road and planted lymph nodes in my abdomen programmed to inflate like bubble wrap when the time came to box myself up and call Fed-Exit.

Yeah, I know what you mean about wrapping this one up. For a long time this was my only proof that I still existed. I’m having separation anxiety, dear partner. You learned from the mourning doves how to wean when the pinfeathers sprout. But for all my quips and my petty jealousy (you got so many more hits on your profile when it was still BLANK, even!!!), I am one of those birds, squawking on a pine branch, blinking into the sun--trying to figure out how the hell you get from here to there.