Spreading blankets

I can't believe how long it's been since my last post. I should start with a good excuse like, Well, I finally drove to New Mexico and it turns out the green chili peppers are hotter than the red ones, and I'm sitting on a rock covered in petroglyphs and there's sand in my shoes and I'm thinking about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and how Bogart was such an asshole about whether or not there was a lizard under that stone.

But no. Tonight I went to a party where everybody sat on the floor and made collages. Apparently this is a thing people do, and Kim's friend Trevor was hosting it in his apartment. Which was tiny. Not by normal standards, but too small to fit the 20 or so people that crammed into it with their magazines and glue sticks (not enough glue sticks) and scissors (not nearly enough pairs) and cupcakes, and booze. Kim's cousin Jesse came too, and the three of us set up shop in a tiny bit of floor space surrounded by people's shoes and bags. I recognized a girl who I'd spoken to briefly at the Belkin Gallery on Thursday night, a classmate of Marian's. She was dressed in exactly the same clothes that she'd worn on Thursday, as if her grey sweatshirt and Pope John Paul pin were part of a uniform. For some reason I couldn't get over the coincidence of seeing her there, again, so soon, but she wasn't equally amazed; I never got her name.

Kim, Jesse and I were isolated from the rest of the party, in our little nook. Kim found a hideous caricature of my dad somewhere and stuck it in front of a city-scape next to Gene Simmons and Moby. Upcoming foes of Godzilla. My part of the collage featured hair, grass, flesh, and octopus tentacles; it took me ages to put together and looked like crap when it was finished. Joseph Cornell I ain't.

During the week, my dog got sick. Out both ends. At the vet's they prescribed antibiotics and gave her some fluids under the skin on her back. In about ten seconds the stuff had ballooned up between her shoulders like an enormous bobbing tumor and when they took the needle out a stream of reddish liquid began to dribble down her side. It looked remarkably bad, for all that it cost me $200. But she felt better as soon as we got home, and is fine now. Both ends.

There are stories in my head that are making me really happy for no good reason. I'm spending too much money. I'm thinking about New York and also thinking about spring. Spring is good for walking. It just turned 5:00 in the morning and I haven't been to sleep yet. My hands are stained blue. I'm wide awake.