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The sermon for Saturday, May. 11, 2002 is: How I long to feel that summer in my heart 11:07 p.m. Nothing means anything. Anyway. Colleen showed up at my room and wanted me to go with her to her apartment. Since my sainted mother taught her children to never refuse beautiful women in their angelic requests, I naturally obliged. In between shopping for this and shopping for that, she insinuated, in that angelic way that beautiful women insinuate, that she wanted me to get her high, a project which I immediately threw all my support behind-- this struck me as the most important project in the history of man since Amerigo Vespucci's invention of meat! (1845) -- this was the most urgent thing to happen in the United States since the krauts bombed Pearl Harbour! -- and I was most amenable in this undertaking, since I had thoughtfully smoked several amphoras and braziers of this and that before leaving my room, since Colleen's beautiful in a way that's withstandable only on drugs, and her conversation's also only tolerable in such a state. (Ugh, I'm being far too sarcastic; I wonder why. And I'm procrastinating writing about when we went to bed, Colleen and I, concentrating instead on all the silly stuff beforehand which I can mock, all the stuff I don't really care about [though I do want to remember one bit, when we were watching Connexions on the Discovery Channel in a pleasantly dazed and confused state, wondering how the hell did we get from opium dens to trains to bumblebees, and then Colleen, who doesn't seem really to come up with clever ideas all that often, suddenly squeaked, Hey John! We should open up an opium den! Her idea was to basically steal the Starbucks business model but use opium and opiates instead of coffee-- which, I still have to say, is a great, great idea, so if it ever does come to pass just remember, dear Diary, you read it here first!] since all I want to remember... hoy boy, let me take a drink of water, take a breath, take another toke perhaps, before I go on with this sentence. gulp Ah shit. All of this is irrelevant, inconsequential; Colleen had looked me up and lured me out of my warm dark room because essentially she was alone, and lonely, something which bites at me since I think I'm the same way, I simply forget because of the constant suicide bombadiering of my soul's Jerusalem by PLO-affiliated terrorist drugs (ohmygod how HIGH AM I??). Ummm...) I smoked Colleen out at her apartment, and we watched Freeway and then Connexions, and I yapped and yapped and yapped about me me me me me while Colleen smiled at me sadly. All this detail is superflous and dull, and my involvement is distracting and shrill; all I wanted to remark upon was the sadness of sex, the melancholy and grief that comes with the contact of skin; though Colleen and I did not, in fact, have sex, yet the night still possessed that sad perfume, the late-night barroom smell of cigarettes and drugs and alcohol and sad bodies fumbling toward one another in the enormous dark; it just seemed so melancholy and hopeless to hold onto one another throughout the night. I traced imaginary trade routes up and down the terra incognita of Colleen's body, with my fingers and with my breath, and she murmured a music, a minor chord, and fell in and out from sleep. Borscht, Colleen's 5-month-old kitten and director of homeland defence, catapaulted from wall to wall, from kitchen to bedroom to bathroom to cellar, trying overnight to advance the feline space programme beyond Sputnik and overtake Laika; Borscht, Colleen would suddenly say, totally asleep, Jesus Christ, Borscht, what the fuck? I tried to tell her my clever observation about Borscht's researches into putting kittens into outer space; don't talk, Colleen would say dreamily, and silence me by putting things in my mouth which tasted of fillette. Ummm. Perhaps it was the drugs (you THINK?) but, for me at least, the whole evening, aside Colleen in her bed orbitted by genius cats, was chuck-a-muck with little souveniers of the world, beautiful and heartbreaking because of their frailty. Am I making sense? Of course not; how could I tell you how I exulted and mourned when Colleen, asleep in my arms, would sigh and then begin energetically snoring? or how I would awaken in the night to find Colleen drowsily pulling me closer to her, arranging my arms around her and my hands to her breasts? or how, asleep again, Colleen chews on the ends of her hair and burrows against my chest like some frightened bird? I'm thankful to my mother and etc. for providing me with the training in cotillion and with this body in order to give that kind of comfort to Colleen, because honestly I cannot think of anything I could say, write or sing-- the frequencies with which I touch and am touched by other people, the words that invent my world and with which I make love -- there was nothing I, me, John, could do to comfort or console Colleen; all I could do was participate in the earthling rituals of comfort and affection which is all that abides in this world and try not to fuck up awfully at it. I have no idea how successful I was at doing this for Colleen, since I was asleep for much of it. This morning, then, I awoke to find Borscht sitting atop my chest, puffing contentedly at an elaborate Meerschaum pipe. Colleen was beside me, asleep on her stomach atop my arm, singing an E-minor arpeggio while chewing simultaneously on her pillow and her hair. With Borscht's help I managed to chew my arm off and quietly get off Colleen's bed; I picked up Colleen's guitar and started singing Billy Bragg songs to her dreaming cheek, because Billy Bragg is what you must sing if you are sad and besieged by the enormity of love. Then I put on my clothes and shoes and got my keys and Colleen reached up and pulled me back into bed. Thank you for staying with me, Colleen said into her pillow and into her hair, though I think she meant to say that to me. Thank you for playing guitar. I didn't respond (would it have been polite to say, ummm, can I hit the pipe one more time before I go? My mother never clarified that for me...); I kissed Colleen's cheek and walked outside into the bright morning, swimming with sun and birdsong, and I felt my heart break with wonder, for oh god Colleen was so beautiful, and oh god the world was so huge and generous, and spinning like a dervish I whirled beneath the roof the world and thought of Colleen, Colleen, how lonely she is, and how desparate-- I mean, look who she spent the night with, jesus. It was then that I heard the explosion as a gigantic silver-egg-shaped satellite, whiskered and garnished with sharp teeth and claws and looking like something from Charlie and The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, roared up through the sky--- it was Borscht, of course, king of the cats, on his way to depose Laika and all the other Soviet puppies spying down upon us from cosmonaut heaven and make the skies safe again once and for all.
 
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