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Thursday, July 16, 2015

Tall, Blond Roberta, from San Francisco, Rest in Peace.





2015?  I expected to be dead by now, or on the Moon.  But I'm here; somewhat aged, but here. And I just wanted to say, Goodbye Amagansett, I'll miss you. It's a goodby letter. I'm not talking, you know, about the Amagansett of the contemporary hype. I mean the little village where Clam Pie was a staple and people still knew people who had the blood of local Indians in them and most everyone had eaten a piece of illegal venison at some time, and most everyone, now that we're speaking of that, was related to everyone else. And a girl was expected to know how to clean out the meat from a lobster claw with her pinky nail which had to be painted pink even if her knuckles were dirty from working at some dismal grind, like cleaning out the cellar.
I'm not homesick. I have Archaic Longing. If it's not her, my old Amagansett, it's one of the dames of my existence. The ones that fish-hooked my heart. It's always there. The something that's missing. It's the God Shaped hole.
I need God.  I pray. I need God because I am not a Master of the Universe. I'm along for the ride, and the driver is drunk. Like I used to be too often. Not get-drunk-fall-down-pass-out drunk, but get high, then higher then higher then keep doing it, go for a drive, maybe down along the frozen sand from Amagansett to Montauk in a Jeep listening to the Jazz Crusaders while smoking opiated hash or down into Harlan County sipping a Coke and Moonshine while dirty dancing with Mama while her two drunken Three Hundred pound sons prepare to slit my throat high and my friend Skip begs me "Tony please, we got to Leave Here!" 
 Now someone like me drunk is driving the car or the Ship of State or the Space Ship Earth. And I have Agida. (How you spell?)  Agida because I'll be going home next month for a few days or a week and that old Hamlet won't be there, because it has disappeared like Brigadoon only Brigadoon will come back. And my Archaic Longing will have to endure another lesson in being in the Decisive Moment. The one that says, that old Now is a fantasy. This now is the only one you can ever be in. You need to chew your food. You need to breath, you need to thank God that you don't think you're God.
There is a payoff though. The longing is the kick in the ass. The longing is what made me search and search. It's what led me to little pieces of enlightenment. Like the eureka moment when a ballet dancer named Roberta, in San Francisco, in 1978, (an acquaintance, not a g.f.), told me that one has to reach out and dare to love somebody, before one can become lovable enough to get some back.
Lovely Roberta. Either she had a gift of being able to give bitter pills to the wounded and make them think it was candy, or I was just finally ready to hear the obvious, at least from Someone Supposed To Know, to paraphrase Lacan.
  

    

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