June 17, 2008

Titus is ill and couldn’t levy himself off the green chair even for breakfast. He reminded me of myself yesterday, in the lethargy of misery, barely stirring from the couch. Maybe we share something lethal in the air. I was like someone sunk in darkness in a movie, though in movies such a condition is generally observed and cared about it and it becomes a plot point leading to some romantic or comic salvation. In real life it just wears–or it always had worn–out.

Received a call from David Verga late in the evening. We met at the Usual for Whisky Night. A few weeks ago he ate too many mushrooms and had a vision which he called a vision of his ultimate horror. His ultimate horror is absolute solipsism: the conviction that there is no God and no love and no world, but only his own perception, and everything that is, his mind created to give consciousness someplace to abide. He was brought out of it by going upstairs and finding his brother, who clearly was not, at that point, a figment of his imagination. I agreed that this would be the ultimate horror. Of course, in the telling, my mind went back to exactly the same thing which had been happening to me that whole day through. His ultimate horror is worse than mine, and I was grateful that things were not reversed. Perhaps that inequity is evened out somewhat because I do not dose myself with hallucinogenics, and it takes me longer to locate and confront the roots of my horror. I have never doubted that the world perceived by my senses is real. I have never doubted that God is real. What I felt yesterday, and what I suppose you’d call my ultimate horror, was that I stood outside the circles of that reality, insubstantial, unobserved, all my efforts futile because I was not included in God’s love. I was able to make a pretty objective case for this as I lay on the couch all afternoon between waking and drunken stupor. Characteristically, my revery did not end in revelation and correction as DV’s did, but only wore thin and eventually faded away, exhausted rather than redressed. Today I am tired but not in an especially metaphysical mood. I doubt that I’ll worry about anything, much, but just try to get my work done. The ox-like mental constitution of the Ohio farm boy wins again, if you can call that winning. Let’s say, "endures."

DV observes that MG was a model for Playgirl way back when. I do a little research. It’s quite true.

Evening: Titus is recovered. I wrote the play End Time in four days. Father eats 100 calories a day, but the hospice nurse says he could linger like this for "weeks." She says this because if his death were imminent, round the clock nursing would be covered by insurance. This way, we have to pay. Linda bears the brunt of all this while I sit here and complain.