November 29, 2016

Blessed rain. Blessed rain. Blessed rain.

Gatlinburg is afire.

Sat in astonishment listening to my playwrights, hearing of lives one does not suspect from the front of a classroom. One is a professional cuddler. We suspected a joke until she showed us her webpage, which offers her services to cuddle men and give them physical comfort short of sex. “It’s hard to convince people I’m not a prostitute,” she says.
    “What if they stink?” someone asks.
    “I have no sense of smell.”
   
Another has a whole line of semi-juvenile fantasy books available from Amazon.
   
Another, who writes of nothing but sex, worries me, because she says she never writes fiction, but only directly out of her own experience. If this is the case, she faces the near occasion of rape every night of her life. She seems, furthermore, to court and tempt exactly this attention from men. I suppose in a perfect world you could court and tempt and still feel free to shrug it off before it becomes real. If this were a perfect world.
   
After the rain a young red shoulder hawked preened and groomed in my walnut. He was radiant, beautiful there in the flood of light. Squirrels fussed about in the grass below, so they were either oblivious or recognized a bird who had just fed.