Rosa Rosa Rosa Rosa

I walked down Main St just after dark tonight to pick up some prescriptions at the pharmacy. The evening traffic seemed overly fast, dense and menacing, an impersonal collective phenomenon horridly devoid of care. A big encroaching mismanaged machine.

Oddly, among the wet, fallen leaves of the sidewalk, there was a decidual trail of family photographs and cards, leading to a broken-backed photo album splayed in the gutter. I was tempted to collect them, peruse them, interrogate them: how often does one find such treasure ? But my neck brace -- and I'll need three full months of it I learned today -- makes the ground a relatively inaccessible part of my world, so I let it all be.

DK dreamed our Cat Billy was telepathically reading him a book about dogs. What a fabulous dream. He said it was unpleasant, though. Not a nightmare, but one of those going-nowhere, annoyingly obscure dreams.

My father once dreamed of a row of boy scouts playing flutes.

(Alienist ! Where are you when I need you ?)

So I walked to the pharmacy, past that silly, pseudo-colonial hamburger restaurant whose name always escapes me -- Captain Something's Tavern -- and saw that their sign, with its series of red neon messages, was boasting of "thireteen televisions" and "nine satellites" and "trivia night" and "karaoke." In the parking lot of the pharmacy I watched a young woman get into her car, light up a cigarette, and turn her stereo up to window shattering level. The pharmacy was overbright with fluorescents. The first thing I saw was a display of at least three shelves worth of pink, shiny, grinning ceramic piggy banks.

Then I think I blacked out.

Just kidding.

How do people stand this life, I wondered on the way home, passing St Jude's weirdly protestant appearing white clapboard colonial church, gazing at the pretty statue on its lawn. I counterpoised the idea of a saint to the whizzing, loudmouthed, pig-pink, multi-channelled, meat eating world I was passing through. And, the idea of hermitage.

Then I thought of "Christianity" and it seemed as remote and unhelpful as the ranks of porcelain piggies in Walgreen's, except at its outermost limits of darkness, silence and unknowingness, where even Christ doesn't matter, doesn't figure. Transchristian realms. Christ is like the Zen trope of the finger pointing at the moon. He's the finger. He's what comes into speech, the Logos, a way of talking about the Unspeakable.

But as remote as it seemed, part of me wanted to go into the church, for the silence and simple acknowledgment-of-mystery that it represents.

Our new orange kitty might have another name. Gertrude has seemed just so ponderous. The kitty is cross eyed. I thought: rosicrucian, then I thought of Henry Miller's "The Rosy Crucifix" -- so maybe Rosy, or even Rosa after Andriessen's opera.

Billy's dream dog book was probably a god book, or a bible: that's why DK found the dream so annoying. Of course, free associating to someone else's dream is not exactly kosher, Sigmund.

Rosa rosa rosa rosa rosa !