Cold

It is cold out, and I am sitting here pondering loneliness. No, I am sitting here feeling lonely and tired and full of laffah and too tired to write and unable to go to sleep without writing. A song plays outside my window, and I think of a poet I met once, who spoke about writing poems with his hands "unlathed"; what a beautiful word - if only I were less lazy, maybe I could use it.

I have become my own prisoner, in this house I built for myself with my own two hands, and it is so fucking cold - how can anyone write when it's so cold? How did Hawthorne not just say, "Fuck it. It's freezing." How did he produce these masterworks like "Young Good Man Brown"? I mean, Thoreau at Walden - that I can accept - he was a nancy boy whose bills were paid by his aunt - and Franklin kept warm by fucking while wearing a coonskin cap. (No, that is not a weird metaphor for "condom". It was an actual fashion statement - google it.)

It is so cold on nights like this you don't even want to sleep with anyone -you just want to pull on as many sweaters as possible. I've been told that I wear too many sweaters; that it's too much for men to work through - but if I am not worth the work of shoving through mounds of wool, I am not sure you're worth the work either.

My computer is about to run out of batteries. I will go read a book, trying to concentrate, but won't succeed - and of course, the whole point of the laffah with labneh was to make me warm, because a friend told me sometimes eating makes people warm. I think she confused eating with sex - that's easy to do. I mean, look at Genesis: Eve eats and discovers she's naked, next thing you know she's with child. Think of all our eating sex metaphors, like "eating a woman out" and then the famous scene with Stanley giving Stella meat, and of course the rabbinics about Jews in the wilderness asking Moses, "Who will give us meat to eat?". Am I the only one who considers meat unsexy? I much prefer coffee and abandoned trees.

God, it is so cold. Just cold enough to make me long for one of your kisses, but not quite cold enough to make me want to change my mind.