April 20, 2024

Booked flight for Shannon. Happy. Snuggle down in my chair like a happy kid. 

Regarded from my front porch the pale gold peonies, the brick of the porch floor, as if by intent, the perfect backdrop. At the base of some of their petals lies deep scarlet. I wonder why every garden in the world does not have them. They, like some of us, are slow but indestructible, bearing on their unlovely branches blooms so voluptuous, so abundant, so redolent of Eden you think they were intended for some other life. For some reason you seldom stand just here in the evening light. You will now, the golden mountain throwing a mountain of darkness eastward, where it will meet the sun of morning. 

T send an audio message, of him rapping (largely to the tune “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” the most bitter (yet somehow unspecific) vituperations of me, beginning with my name. Sometimes you think it’s comic; sometimes you don’t. But in there among how I stink and am loud and everyone wishes I were dead, he notes honesty, and courage (or at least stubbornness) in expressing truth, which makes one think it’s a satire in the voice of someone who hates me for truth-telling. The whole performance is too drunken for one to know for sure. He’d have to sing drunkenly worse than that for me to forget the angel who fronted Sister Raven on stage with us so long ago.