In Which Don Quixote Lives a Delusion as if it Were Real Life

I recommended you head to los Angeles in your new found freedom from real estate. I meant that. And not only because the film industry is situated there. Sure, you could get famous there with a keen look in your eye and a fresh face. Rosy cheeks and some savvy on the casting couch could get you far.

I'm sure a kid like you with big problems in his head could work them out there. Probably do a lot of cocaine and see an expensive shrink. I think it could work for a young gentleman like you. Remember to pack that fresh face.

And your sister, if you can dig her up, she could make friends, too. Honest men out there are always on the lookout for a young girl to perform honest services for them.

If not Los Angeles, Bangkok.

Also, I notice that you have not written since I wrote yesterday. I'm aching for your letters, they are a sort of anchor in the murky sea of life on which this body of mine floats like an abandoned skiff.

And now I think there is blood in the water.

Sancho howls leaning off the roof with one hand on the chimney. I hear it whistle down the chimney and haunt my thoughts. I wish he'd shut up, but then I might not know he was here. I've been blind for days. I can't remember if I lost my eyes somewhere, or forgot to put them in when I woke up, or simply stabbed them out with forks because I couldn't stand all the stupid sensory information yelling at me all the time.

Maybe I've never had eyes. That's what the evidence seems to support.

Don Quixote de la Mancha

In Which Don Quixote Loses His Lustre

Are you thinking of moving? I think you should head to Los Angeles. Maybe there you could get back some of the international cultual predominance you bemoan having lost. And yet, like you say, we're famous. Well, you anyway.

Me, I live in the antechamber of fame, waiting for it to call me in for my audience, which I hope will be long, but probably won't be. And during which I'll have to find a way to tell my long story in a short time. Perhaps no more than fifteen minutes.

There once was a man from Nantucket

With a broom and a mop and a bucket.

You know, a crushing sort of sadness keeps me from finishing this verse.

A real crushing kind of

sadness.

I wish Sancho was here.

to at least mop up the tears.

Which run...

Also, There was man I was trailing a long time ago. Odvallo. A hunchbacked sorceror. with wickedness in his veins. I killed him. It was bloody. His wickedness oozed out of him and got all over me, I think. And it was more difficult than I imagined. In a lot of ways. And it made me reconsider a lot of things.

It was... not what I expected.

Give me a minute. I need to collect myself. And more paper.

Find me somewhere, I'll be sure to be there.

Don Quixote De La Mancha

These Many Months

These many months ‘neath starry skies and sun-scorched celestes I have wandered through moor and heath and plain and wood, never sure if I be pursuing or pursued. And now I’ve caught up with it, or it with me, and tired, ragged, unsure, I stumble homeward in a shambles.
There, I find a stack of letters, duly sealed and signed. On paper that smells of drafts and fogs and family romance. Written in the screed of a sad man whose faculties are not always reliable. Mixed in, indistinguishable, are some I meant to send with those I was meant to receive. I read them all as if they were yours, and smile when you say curious quixotic things. I laugh that you have become so close through our letters that you begin to write like me, in my hand, of my life.
Sancho Panza is somewhere. Either he lurks in the kitchen cooking something smelly, or maybe that is just the food in the larder going bad. Maybe I left him somewhere and should have nothing to eat tonight. I wish I hadn’t, though, because I’m terribly hungry.
And in this cold, o’er-large house with rooms boarded up, whose contents I’ve forgotten, there are a great many things I wish were different. Maybe in those old rooms there are the things I’d like to know, the people I’d like to see, the Don Quixote I’ve been looking for. I think I’ll rifle there among the cobwebs.
Maybe there will be images of beginnings, of the origins I seem obsessed with, which turn out always to be empty rooms full of the things I left in there, only older, decayed, mildewed and made the kingdom of rats. I still imagine them, though, as sparkling parlors peopled with dangerous and inspiring souls and things that can tell me something about being. Bright with a light coming from nowhere. A farce taking place about someone’s hair and violation, or a devot with a funny alliterative name. I believe the dusty disguise. I tell myself that I don't recognize my own furniture, but only see it in inklings of how I came to be what I am. And I'm not altogether wrong, anyway.

Blood and suffering and electricity. There seems to me to be no reason to differentiate registers in the humors. The material of the body, of my body, is multiplex. A multiplex.

Nothing burns like an effigy.

Slumping on my writing table under the weight of it all
Don Quixote De La Mancha