It's the seventh night of Hanukkah,
and I am watching Christmas movies,
wanting to drink my anxiety up and away
but resisting with profound self-candor.
I got invited to do a comedy showcase tonight,
but I bailed because I wasn't mentioned
in the social post, and I am just lazy and lethargic,
plus I'd just complain about Home Alone
where Macaulay Culkin's character Kevin
doesn't take even one bite of the mac-n-cheese.
in this juxtaposing scene, I am content to stay in,
fight my own burglars with frying pans,
and buy too many books from Amazon,
when I have a ton of books piling up
on the nightstand next to me,
which also holds one photograph
of two people in Central Park.
of two people in Central Park.
Barth's postmodern extravaganzas,
Garcia Marquez's magical realism,
O'Connor's dark comedy and moral seriousness,
and Dickens' entertaining and strange plots
and bringing them to bear on my life
in an accessible, subversive, and inventive way,
is all I have done today/tonight.
an altogether less exotic and more wholesome milieu,
exploring the irony that attempting to improve yourself can make you worse for wear,
and only the dead know Brooklyn,
but even my T.C. Boyle earrings are aware of that,
and the fact that I am stalling.