Hard Duty in the City of Light

“A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.”
L. Cohen


I’m going to Paris. I’m assigning myself a mission, one very few visitors have accomplished, fewer still who stayed five weeks.

I will enter no art museums, visit no cathedrals, browse no cemeteries, view no monuments. Not the Louvre, not the Arc de Triomphe, not the Champs-Élysées, not Notre Dame. Not Jim Morrison’s grave. Five weeks in the City of Light and I’m not going to the Eiffel Tower. Though I won’t avert my eyes from horizons. Horizons are good for the soul.

I may hunt down the Impasse Maubert - I’m reading Eco’s The Prague Cemetery. And I’ve been given a mission to track down Sam Beckett's manuscript of Molloy. The Sorbonne is exempt; tourists are barred. Not the sewers; it breaks my heart but I have spoken.

What if I meet an enchanting nymph named Angelique, and she says, “Nous nous rencontrerons par la Pyramide.” I’ll reply, thumbs hooked in my belt, “Pas possible. Par le bout du Passage Ramey, ou pas du tout.” And she’d say, “Formidable! Emportez-moi! Ici, maintenant, Milord!” Which is to say, I will not be moved.

Five weeks. That’s scary. Can I do that? Will I be the first? Who wasn’t brought there in chains?


Will I get a statue? At least a plaque? A sidewalk café?

Going to Live Forever

I like Leonard Cohen, I’ve told you that. He’s funny. He has a new album out - the last two were about being old, this one’s about dying. He says he’s going home, he says he’s riding that broken banjo across the dark infested sea. He thinks he’s going to live forever.

His Bobness, Dylan, he says the same. He thinks there’s a highlands after these lows.

I don’t know. I don’t have that feeling. I don’t see any reason why anything following this, if anything does, would be better or worse. It wouldn’t make sense.

I love you guys, you’ve splattered my walls with fantastic luminous designs, but I’m going to hang out with Fritz Nietzsche. He’s got a head’s elevation on all the streetcorner iconoclasts. He walks like a man.

Look, if there really is another side, wait for me. We need to go have a word with that Lou Salome minx. At least you guys got some pussy.

Earn It or Burn It

I'm out for a sunny Sunday run and this guy, white haired, thin, eight inches altitude on me, comes bounding up and passes me on the left. I hit the pedal and pull away, I'm expecting a fight but I hear him wheeze and huff and he's phosphorescence in my wake.

I'm not fast, and if someone pulls up to pass and they're faster, common enough, I have no bone to pick, in fact, I enjoy seeing how it can be done. Really.

But if you're going to try to steal the lead, if you're playing to gain and maintain half a block, and people do that - just to put a rotten spot in my day - you're going to have to earn it.

That's it. Short post.