Mathias B. Freese

I am 69 now, and how have I reached this age? I was aware all the time. Interiorly I could be 20, 40, even 50, but time has brought me to this point ineluctably. Fascinating, for the exterior self has weathered, grown not a little creaky and grayer and less efficient, yet the edifice stands. That is only part of it. The shock of 69 is still with me. I have lived perhaps too long.

Inside I feel not so old, perhaps more mature, perhaps. Inside I have not been weathered. I have been stressed and tested. I have endured great adversity. Death and dying are now more imminent than ever, although always present at any time in life. That far off place which we think of when we are younger now seems very close by or next store, like the neighbor. Time has run down my leg like piss, largely unseen and unfelt.

Suddenly, goes the cliche, I’ve reached an age that alarms or makes me realize more than ever I am mortal man. No longer can I play the game that growing older is over there. I realize it is here, in my face, in spades. I cannot run. I cannot hide, as time manipulates me into the cognizance of 69, not 39, or 49. It is not melancholy, I feel. I don’t rue much, for I know that much of our lives are unlived. We have been damn fortunate to have just been given existence, although the awareness of it more than harries us throughout our lives. I am only slightly encouraged by my writing, or creativity, which forever makes me age-free — or young, for words and thinking express durational time, sweet time, and not the arc of chronology.

I have asked my son who lives in Chicago to try to see me more often, as time is short and we need to engage one another, for he and I know one another and yet we are ignorant of each other. No man knows himself, and no man can know another. The best we can share are our impressions and approximations — our defined illusions — of the other.

I live with the knowledge that I have had a good run, so many die at earlier ages. Grateful for that, I take philosophic comfort in that I could absent the world having done a few good things with my life. It was a fast crapshoot and the dice skittered and bounced crazily and smacked against the wall, for it was a good throw and I didn’t come up deuces.

At 69 reminds me that I must consider and reflect even more as I near my end. I must resolve not to seek pleasure so much as resolution, completion and loving more than I can at this time. Jane is much younger than me and in that is my last throw of the dice. If i can pass the torch on to her, I would be very satisfied. And what is that torch? To be freer than she is now, to be more creative than what she is now, to attain a greater sense of awareness and to always struggle to reach what she cannot. For these injunctions have driven me. They are good ones. Perhaps they would embolden her.

This maddening expression of life, this spark between birth and death is agonizingly unfathomable. In a peculiar way we do not own our lives for the on/off switch is held by someone or something elsewhere. For some life is continuous, heaven and a hereafter — oh! you cowards! You wish to continue, you greedy people. For me it is bewildering to have the moment and then to be snuffed out. It is a cosmic tease, perhaps an axiom of time and space, for we do see and we are aware and the only creature on this planet to contemplate its end. A devilish, a fiendish existence — and wonderful and majestic as well,  has been given to each of us; perhaps this explains metaphorically why we cry at birth, really wail. Whatever, that is what is.

Eventually no one survives to remember us in all our spastic glory and evanescence. What is to be made of all this? Look up at the night sky until you cannot take the implications of it any longer for it contains great terror, loneliness and dreadful sadness. Perhaps the best we have is love for one another as we go down into the sea.

We all will be gone. My last wish is not heaven or meaning, but an awareness that grasps my hand and wishes me love, bon voyage and peace as I wade into my eternal rest — unless, that is, I come back as a giraffe. Who knows? We assuredly don’t.

Yesterday was my birthday. I am so clotted with feelings about the age I am I will leave it be for a moment. Jane treated me for the day on the Strip. Vegas is in a valley surrounded by mountains. The mountains, from the distance, strike me as “false,” in that they seem or appear to be artist paintings or fake. Probably an atmospheric quirk but I feel as if they are stage sets. My point is that there are still stretches of unused desert land here and when we drove to the bus terminal it appeared as if lost in the middle of a tract. For a moment I felt lost in the great American West. I imagine the infrastructure of a big city still has not been installed but the strip has that quality to it.

We were smart and drove along the strip in a double decker bus with solar screens on the windows to protect the eyes. You can buy a pass for on and off all day long which we did ($7). Bus kiosks are stationed at every major casino or hotel. We began on the South Strip. The traffic in the morning was dense and we were glad for public transportation. We visited the Mirage, the Venetian and Caesars Palace.  In mid day it struck me I was in a Disneyland of a kind, buildings shooting up in baroque designs, an Italian campanile, a reconstruction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and the Bridge of Sighs, all of them apparently very accurate representations. Often I metaphorically rubbed my eyes for it is hard to visually digest this melange of styles and periods. The next time we go we will work it out that we see some of this during the day and at night when the whole place goes neon.

There is a side of the Strip which is scruffy and Coney Island-ish. Jimmy Buffett has a place here which reeks outside of cocoanut and probably his Tommy Bahama underwear — stay clear. It strikes me that the maintenance of these casinos is paramount given the wear and tear of public ins and outs, the 24/7 comings and goings. Forget the upkeep and thus falls Vegas. Imagine the flushing in any one hotel and you have think of the environmental impact of this blitz and bling. Given the economy, building still goes on as construction cranes peek in and out of other buildings. Restaurants are omnipresent, secretions squeezed from tubes. Traffic, as I said, is clotted and manic, not quite Manhattan, but steroidal. Into this glitzy world I spent my day.

We ate at the Carnegie deli which is not quite up to snuff as their fries were not Jewish delicatessen fries as I know them, which are crinkly cut so that the oils saturate all crevices; the Dr. Brown Cel-Ray was glorious as ever and so was the brisket and pastrami. The bowl of pickles and sour tomatoes were not available except for a stingy grouping of sour and half-sour pickles. My time has passed. Being 69 does that to you — not nostalgia, just a tinge of regret. Okay, nostalgia! I know you can never go back again, but what is so terrific about going ahead. After that overloaded lunch I realized that if eating Chinese food make you hungry an hour later eating Jewish deli takes you three days before you can once again feel the pangs of hunger. We moved on to the slots, part of Jane’s plan for me this sacred day, for I was vaginally discharged 69 years ago on 23 July 1940, a few months befoe Pearl Harbor. August was a bitch in the crib.

We moved on to the slots. We were both doing so so when I asked Jane to give me her last twenty as I felt I wanted to go back to the original machine that had shown signs of “promise,” for I got several “spins,” which is a chance to make additional money. In any case I played and sure enough I won a game for about $700 and then a spin for about $200, a total of about $900 and change; the bells going off, sending out whizzing noises, a very small contingent of players came to praise our good fortune. Oh, the delight watching numbers calculating your winnings rapidly scrolling up on the counter, Oh, the delight of hearing the chimes of gambler heaven. I told Jane to enjoy cashing in the gelt and to ask for 100 dollar bills just for the fun of it, crispies. Like Arnold, I’ll be back. In fact, I set to memory the location of this particular machine, for we are superstitiously wed for life. And for Jane her day was sweetened by this serendipitous surprise for her guy, really for us.

In Caesars Palace we passed once again the infamous Regis Gallerie, I think, with a flat screen outside its glitzied window display, with these words or something like it: “Dear Michael our friend, we mourn your passing,” while also re-playing a video of his visit. It was in this store that Jackson bought almost a million dollars of glorified shit in a spending spree that lasted no more than 45 minutes. I saw the show several years ago and realized the emptiness of Jackson and the grossly opportunistic  owner who was licking his lips as he knew he was catering to an all time schmuck. American business at its most grotesque. Jackson’s dead and the same capitalistic ghoul is still masturbating off his name. I imagine his having raucous sex with his bimbo wife and afterwards throwing a box of  tissues on her belly and telling her to wipe herself as the sheets might get soiled, for they are 400 count threads.

Vegas — lewd, repugnant, glorious, vile, empty, cheesy, fantastic, vulgar and the food is top notch. Get lost about what it is, just look in a full-size mirror.

Dear Alice, how do you know about the Miller Analogy Test I took in 1966?  Please identify yourself. And please do not write in French. English is my mother tongue. Other than Moliere perhaps, no one equals Shakespeare, a gift from friendly aliens. I promise not to respond in early Mayan.

A series of calamities, small  letter “c,” have befallen us, as we Lewis and Clark Nevada; we are now sleeping off the floor, the window blinds are all in, the new couch was delivered and almost damaged in the house (!), delivered by klutz and putz. While this goes on, we make merry for our mutual sanity by buying accessories — throw pillows, bedroom lamps, and venture at day’s end to The District — last night was Ben and Jerry’s. What we enjoy is coffee, a pastry and plopping down on bistro rattan chairs to watch the world go by. A real pleasure.

Jane has connected the new computer I got from my son. So change makes me learn Vista, although  Jordan has told me that in Septemeber a new upgrade will improve the system, whatever. With computer up, I can now get back to my new book of short stories and begin to work on my new edition of the tetralogy. I am in our new den and the light is soft and good and so a new beginning for this old fart. Jane has purchased a wireless mouse for me which is a delight; clearly she is of the generation who first lived and learned with computers. She is not intimidated by them while I scream eek! The house is shaping up, we are settling down, things are going into place so that we are feeling at home.

As I write, Jane received word that her house has been sold and monies will be transferred into her account. It has been a rough journey, given all the paperwork and buffoons involved with that blizzard of paper. What is the difference between us and a third world country? Answer: Our arrogant belief that we are not. When the carpet layers came to our house, one revealed while chatting that he was from Guatamala. We spoke and he made the sage comment that givernments, including ours, are corrupt. The people just have to persevere. I agree. So no matter where you live, the morons and killers are in charge. Perhaps democracies are very good at deluding themselves that they are “better.” So, if you want to live as an American Yankee in Cabo, don’t worry about the Mexican cartels, for we have them in Congress. You can be murdered with a machete and machine gun, or take the other route and be killed by the absence of legislation. Choose your poison.

The last paragraph should come before I just noticed, but so what, for it is all stew of the mind. The temps are in three digits so we stayed in today emptying out cartons while my intellectual soulmate reads The Brothers Karamazov, probably the greatest novel ever written, they say. Jane and I went to the local library and gave them our books and offered to run workshops in an attempt to get known in the neighborhood, to volunteer and to make some literary connections. The real answer is to continue to write; serendipity is what I count upon, works all the time.

We are going for a late night swim or wading as the air is thickly heavy and dry. That is why I came here. The pool is around the block.

Adieu

By tomorrow we will be sleeping in our bed. Furniture will be roughly situated. Painting, prints and photos to be assigned their places. Some physical semblance of order will take shape. Internally there is no real order now as the rhythm of writing and thinking has been jarred loose from its moorings. All is repairable. A wide array of things to do, to be seen, to be tried out are lining up. One of them is to take a bus ride along the three mile strip, getting a sense of the casino/hotels for further investigation. I am beginning to sense the major avenues, parkways, streets and highways in and about our house, GPS free. I know the best car wash in town — unbelievable to observe; the nearby Walgreen’s for meds; the post office; the local Wells Fargo and so on. I recently got a decent haircut here from a barber who seemed as if he had just finished 10 years at prison. Some tradesmen who service our home are incompetent, coming on strong with their bull shit and others are able and only a few do a good day’s work. The state changes, human nature does not.

Writing these blogs only serves to lower the anxiety level as I try to acclimate to all these various environments I am being subjected to. Spock would say, “Live long and prosper.” It sounds better in Vulcan Yiddish. Jane, apparently, is in high spirits as she is working on her next book while sitting on her piano stool next to a kitchen desk. Writers write and dilettantes say they want to write. To those who waste my time by saying if only they could find the time to write a book I offer epoxy as a remedy, to glue their asses to the chair. Writing is commitment resting upon a need resting upon a slab of genetic urge to tell.

I will spend the next few months going over the Tetralogy for errors and typos and readying it for  its second edition with a new cover for those upset with the sight of swastikas. Parallel to that, I look forward to those comfortable evenings hand editing my next work, line by line, so I get it as sharp as can be. Jane will edit the book in terms of helping to select stories and to arrange them in a reasonable reading experience. After that I have it printed and work on marketing it which means I will do no more than my best. I weary of marketing, capitalism, and this entire country. Perhaps a writer should become a hermit and die a hermit. I find nothing comforting out there in the book world and what I find especially distasteful are the wannabe writers selling their souls to be published. As I said in an earlier blog, when a Holocaust survivor works on Shoah business and views his being a survivor as an “occupation,” I am ready to puke. And just today I saw an ad in the local paper advertising his book  and the kicker line that if you go to his website you can download lesson  plans on the Holocaust. Oh, yeah, brain dead secondary school teachers who at the most give a day or two in social studies classes on the Holocaust and often poorly so, writing up lesson plans on the most horrific event on this planet since man stood up: “Remember, boys and girls, Ann’s belief in the goodness of human beings.” Interview the girl after she was put into a camp. That’s right, let a teenager sum up the Holocaust for all of us.  And how sweet it was!

I will refrain from extensively commenting on Michael Jackson, our Peter Pan pedophile, who was so damaged by such a damaging family; but what can you really determine from pop sources of who he was and was not? However, we have reached a point in which the illusion is the fact and I feel free discussing him. Soon facts will disappear as the concrete atoms of evidence. In that light Jackson was entertaining — Astaire thought him one of the great dancers of our time; I think of him as dreck on toes. Touch one child and you are a goner with me. In this age everything is forgiveable. This culture has the memory of a gnat. Perhaps at the risk of offending, Christianity’s greatest distortion about human beings is forgiveness. Forgiveness is in. The more you forgive the more indulgences you will rack up, spending less time in hell. Forgiveness, in my eyes, is a rare coin, to be spent wisely and prudently. Enough of the twists and turns of religion, a worldwide mass delusion.

“Come the dawn” is a priceless dialogue card from the silent motion picture era. Something  pleasantly arch and Victorian to it as if drawn by Beardsley.

Adieu.

While I blog the handyman is renovating the upstairs closet. He will then move on to another closet and install shelving to house Jane’s many books and finally caulk the backsplash in the kitchen. And so it goes. We will be asking him to give us a bid on tiling the outside balcony deck which is spongy. Isn’t all this riveting? The other night we heard shrieks as if transformers mating and we were up all night; finally it turned out to be a motor connected to the air conditioning which we did without for a few hours in this unbelievable heat. Someone defined life as one damn thing after another and so it is with this house and our torrid adventure in Nevada. Summer sizzles here. Parts of the house are “healed,” shower curtains in and mats on the floor. The landline is in. The computer gizzards are in. We are waiting for the new carpeting to bring it together although we have concerns about the installation. In any case I usually have a back up plan in place — yell and throttle,  then slay the sales person’s first born if that doesn’t work.

This weekend the temps are to be about 108 or so. Imagine licking your tongue on a lit tungsten bulb and you have an idea. We stayed inside a mall for a while to escape the flames outside. I try to take Jane with me on acts of mercy, shopping, buying, eating, to escape the monotony of setting up house. Flamboyantly, I have purchased my girl a standing mirror and an exorbitantly expensive floor lamp for reading and just good looks. I bought a fireplace screen made in the Philippines (not China!) because it had an Alhambra-esque appearance to it, swirls and curlicues. I was stunned by a Natuzzi leather couch, semi Art Deco, with tuxedo arms, tobacco colored which we bought and was a steal as the economy brought this particular store down. And off we went to an upscale furniture house and purchased a rattan accent chair.  I am one of those offbeat men that has a flair for furniture and design and is not put off by shopping. All this keeps us intact as money flows from us down to the delta — going broke but gleeful all the way (oh, yeah).

As all this craziness goes on I write. Can’t believe it. Purchased lawyers writing tablets (so biblical sounding) and off I went and knocked out a 13 page story and an alternatve ending, suggested by Jane, my muse and editor, for another story. Having been given a business card by a survivor which had “Holocaust survivor” on it, just riled me the wrong way and thus I wrote about it. For some (for shame!) it is an occupation. When a writer is in the room all is fair in love and war.

I recall an Open School Night in which I told parents that I was a writer who happened to be a teacher and because of that I could work with their children in a different way. Instead of grammar and usage and all that. I could work with them on writing in ways that go far beyond English teachers. Well! The next day a guidance teacher came up to me and queried if I had said that last night. You see, we begin with a McCarthy-like query. Apparently one or more parents complained that I had the audacity to step out of my role as a teacher; after all, they paid their school taxes and did not want a writer for a teacher, I suppose. I looked at the guidance teacher with much scorn and asked him if he had run interference for me, in fact, did he tell these Neanderthals they were getting two instructors for the price of one. I was annoyed with him because the case to be made was self-evident. He was a gutless wonder, poor man. I was told that they wanted to transfer their sons(s) out of my class. I told him I was glad, that he should do it immediately and give their spawn to the incompetent in the next classroom, because he knew grammar very well but had never published anything in his life — a grammarian as eunuch. If you want courage, integrity and honor, do not engage secondary school teachers.

While I have bragging rights, I give you this anecdote that may have made me a “legend” in my own time. By the time this took place I had enough years as a psychotherapist to hold my own in a variety of situations. In fact, I used the faculty to test out my diagnostic skills — this one is a hysteric, that one is experiencing a homosexual panic, this one is narcissitic and patently paranoid. A young male student submitted an essay about “Hamlet” which was apparently plagiarized.  Showing it to my chairman, he agreed it was obviously cribbed. With panic and anxiety he chose the wrong way. I gave him a 60 which allowed him to pass, given his grades so far, for the term. I was not into savaging young people with grades.

It did not end there. The parents called for a meeting with the chairman and administrator as well as yours truly.The father was an attorney, and I later learned that the mother had gone on a witch hunt by setting up a kid in my class to secretly tape record my teaching. That is a side note and I strongly took her to task after she revealed the machine. (I got enraged and labeled it “scurrilous.”) The father said almost nothing. For about 15 minutes she berated me — I was very still and  chose to go into a  therapeutic mode as listener. I heard her on several levels. In short I was not nurturing, I didn’t care for her child, I was not caring, I was not sensitive to his needs. The administrators, as is their wont, played Pontius Pilate. All right, I’m a big man now. Finally, when I had all this assessed and metabolized, I leaned forward to her and said: ”Mrs. So and So, I am not your son’s nipple.”

Before she could recover, her husband grabbed her knee as if to signal don’t go any further with this cat.

After they left, the administrator put his head to the wall and laughed for quite some time.Teachers who heard this story, for there is never confidentiality in schools, probably remarked that there goes Freese again, others probably got their surrogate jollies from it.  

FedEx just arrived with a Dell computer from Jordan as a house warming and birthday gift, for it is in July that I am 69. Jane also got a FedEx telling her that if she signs the enclosed closing papers, she is an inch away from becoming monied by selling her house. When it rains, it pours.

The painter is back (a young kid, really) for he did a shit-poor job the first time; the second call back is for carpeting which was defective throughout the house. The carpet man shared over the cell that he was in his “help mode” and I retorted that I am in my “victim mode.” I detest bullshit language like that and he soon sensed my rage. Two major efforts backfired but we are recovering and with a vengeance. What do you do when the painter tells you he did not bring an extension for the paint roller? I think I will buy a six foot pole and a tube of KY for this lad. The balcony deck has to be repaired, we may tile it — more bucks; I observe myself worrying and as Jane says so aptly, “You borrow trouble.”

I used to tell clients not to do a future fuck on themselves, that is, don’t do a number on yourself before it happens and here I am triple fucking myself. While I am writing this blog, I go inside and observe the paint job being done, inspecting it, making sure details are attended to. It is like guiding a kid’s hand as you teach him or her how to make cursive letters…vexing, annoying and not a little boring. Teaching sucks, learning does not suck if self instigated. Yesterday, Jane and I saw “Public Enemies,” which was well directed, beautifully photographed and had a hollow heart to it; within minutes I was talking to myself rather than watching, for the picture was not involving. For me a film has to grab my feelings or mind, or the rest of it is all Candyland and production values. The next on the list is “The Hurt Locker.” So Jane and I wander across Vegas, shopping, eating at different venues and buying things for our new home. We know enough to take breaks from the tediousness and aggravation of so large a move. Yesterday a neighbor stopped by to give us some diced melon and to chat which was much better than a bowl of sugar.

Unfortunately I can be unruly with Jane and I work on that; I don’t want to feed on her when things go awry or wrong. I am a classic displacer and that is no fun, especially when I see it occuring right before my eyes and especially to someone I care so much about. Jane sums me up as a mixture of Jerry Lewis and Larry David. “Why? Why?” Phil Silvers asks the heavens in the Mad World flic. That is why Jews don’t need priests. We speak directly to a Jehovah who does not exist and save a whole lot of time. In fact, we are the ventriloquist and god is the dummy. I will have to think on that myself.

During this slow-mo chaos, I managed to write a rough draft for my new book dealing with a Holocaust survivor who spends his time going to schools and giving talks, not an unusual volunteer effort among survivors. In a story I read by Philip Roth decades ago called “Defender of the Faith” I encountered a story over my head but the jist if I recall it is that a Jew asks a favor of another Jew simply because he is of the faith. I believe Roth got flak from Jewish groups, et al, because he argued that it was an unnecessary dispensation — all this occurring in the army. Given Bernie Madoff, one cannot assume that another Jew, Catholic, et al will refrain from fucking you simply because you are a member of the clan. So, in my story I argue against teaching the Holocaust in certain ways, saying that survivors are mortal men and women who have been traumatized by the most horrific act of human history. They are not saints

It was triggered by a survivor telling me that only recently he had given his 500th lecture as if it made a whit of difference. He seemed to have an inordinate prideful feeling to it which somehow rubbed me the wrong way; thus, a story emerges. The story, in part, deals with Shoah business.

I go to relax.

Adieu.

I hear the tiler on the second floor, Miguel from Colombia, doing his thing while his non-speaking apprentice cuts through tile on the outside lawn with a shrieker machine, annoying, I am sure, to the unknown neighbors. The neighbor to our left is a psychiatrist and his wife, a nurse; he works at a local university. He rents. As I type on these annoying chiclets, I feel fatigue. There is great news about my son which I’ll save for a better moment — he went out and hired a cast, got talented people about him including an Indie moviemaker and made a short documentary for the grand sum of $500. I am impressed but not surprised, elated for him and how he has broken through the matrix into his own reality. He is flying emotionally because he networked, advertised, organized and assembled a troupe of players and technicians as well as artists and made it happen. He is now an artistic doer! All this joy on the eve of Rochelle’s death, 10 years ago. Time flies as we die with it.

Two months ago Jane and I acted not on a whim but on strong feelings that Jane’s family was more than off the wall but at times vicious and that my ex was not only paranoid but also psychotic in that she was inventing situations. We investigated Nevada as best we could and made it happen. It has been a whirlwind adventure and there must be something to it because the street leading into our enclave is called Whirlwind Terrace. I know full well that months will pass before some semblance of regularity will take on shape and substance; meanwhile, I work on engaging other aspects of life,  reading when I can, shopping, blogging, carping, kibitzing, being annoying, laughing, being more than annoying and being anxious and worrying, all the delectable aspects of being neurotic. Just note: neurotics build castles in the sky and psychotics live in them.

Although not having a landline phone installed as yet, we use our cell. I am enjoying the temporary stay off the grid. I don’t wear a watch — never did like the control of time. The lack of communication is just fine and the TV is not up as yet which is also just fine and what is really fine is my using Jane’s laptop to delete all those emails I thought were critical — Thoreau: “Simplify! Simplify!” We are afloat in Las Vegas — no contacts of substance as yet, no real sense of the place, no social glue, except for one brunch we attended with Holocaust survivors. One is in contact with me. I gave a short and spontaneous talk and engaged them, several asking me questions about how to write their own stories. I would like to teach creative writing with a group such as this one, but we will see. 

I am just too tired to go on. So I end here.

I am writing this lament lying on a mattress 6 inches off the floor. I am typing on Jane’s laptop with its chiclet keys which suck. The Gates gadjet rests on a Casablanca ceiling fan box, the fan itself, recently installed, is blowing air about my buttocks. Things have not gone well. The paint job was poorly done and confrontation is around the corner; the newly laid carpeting was defective and has to be removed at no cost to us except we had to invest more to get better. Because of these delays, our furniture lies crated in our garage. Consequently we are sleeping on the floor, have no real dining table to eat at and are thoroughly stressed and inconvenienced. I am in a passive mode, realizing that shit happens and that people fuck you out of stupidity, seeking short cuts, negligence and lumbering imbecilities. One handyman we dismissed early because he was as communicative as Lon Chaney Jr during full moon. I realize full well that I cannot count upon the kindness of strangers.

We are encountering hard times and dealing at moments with bad luck, agonizing accidents and diminished human beings. I read a book written by a Holocaust survivor I met at a brunch last Sunday. We exchanged books. After reading it, I have no real complaints. I am not starved, I am not whipped nor have I had a rubber truncheon tattoo my body. I did not experience a young baby grabbed by its chubby legs and whipped against a railcar wheel, its brains splattered about. No, I will not complain but simply lament these shitty adversities and slosh through the dreck with fortitude.

Jane and I are made of sterner stuff. Between her mastectomy and rearing by a demented Scarlett O’Hara mother who smokes cheroots and thinks she is Miss Kitty, Gunsmoke’s great whore, and my trail of tears, we will make it. As I think about it perhaps I may get off on all this misery, a kinky secondary gain. It is all so tiring, wearisome and frustrating.

We try to get away psychologically from all this mess by gambling at the slots; we seek out different restaurants — many good ones at that. We shop for household items and in so doing pleasure ourselves on buying for our home, for we are quite taken with this well-maintained community. We notice little things such as showing ID whenever we use a charge card — Las Vegas is the king city for identity theft; Jane observes how too much of supermarket shopping is self-service. I observe that Vegas seems to be growing out of some desert embryo, for the desert and the acute mountain peaks seem disturbed by these invading ants. Vegas seems new to me and in continuing development. Again the species tears up the land. No one belongs in Vegas. It is a violation. Rightfully so, the Native American realizes how diminished we are.

The temperature a few days ago was 108. At times this Jew and Jack Mormon are about in the noonday sun. I am always aware of it but I am inured to it; out west it is a sign of friendliness to offer bottled water to customers, workers and those potential folk who will ultimately end up fucking you. The heat is draining and you have to keep gurgling water to keep one’s senses clear.

When this aging old fart with the libido of a satyr on steroids cuddles fetally next to Jane, all is well. Refreshingly resilient with a grand sense of humor which can contain the Hebraic darknesses I own, with an openness and willingness to think better of others, Jane and I are a hilarious team — Mutt and Jeffing our way through life. Jane never had the experience of buying cookies in a Jewish bakery. She reminds me that growing up cookies meant Oreos and Lorna Doones, not the buttery, nutty, and chewy delicacies I knew as a child. Recently at a gathering of Holocaust survivors, Jane sampled real Jewish food. It is not in her experience to buy cookies by the pound, freshly made. So, I found the same bakery for this event and we devoured half a pound of manna. That last sentence sums up what a Jewish husband — or any mensch should do. To care for another is to love.

I love my girl.