I shouldn’t write on Friday nights. Especially after I have taken an ill-advised nap that has left me groggy and boiler-room steamy in my head. Still, here I am.

I am agitated. I have an unlit cigarette in front of me. It’s Fag #5. I don’t want to smoke it until I’m finished this. Yes. I know. I haven’t quit yet. I’ve been stuck at 5 a day for about six weeks. I’ve either got to quit or smoke more.

Friday sounds like so much fun. Friday night makes me want to go out. But where would I go? I look agitated. I scratch something that doesn’t itch. I roll my head back and forth. Perhaps I’m working out a kink in my neck. Perhaps I’m just looking for a sensation.

I miss sex some. That’s not pretty. But it’s true. Sex has a magic. It’s apart from everything else, you know what I mean? If it’s right, it requires my body, my mind, my soul, too, charged and engaged. And it removes me from life, from commercials and reruns and disaster and the government and shopping lists. But of course I don’t often do it right. Or rather I didn’t often do it right. But when we did it right, it was miraculous and dazzling and that’s what I miss.

That’s all I’ve got. My cigarette points at me, tilted on the edge of the ashtray. It’s a compass. I won’t waste your time more and I won’t tempt my cigarette longer.

Dorothy – no, better – , Dorothy’s Aunt and Uncle reckon the inside of their grey heavy front door all of their lives. All it needs is a good push. And maybe a conk on the head, and perhaps a little hope and it would squeak on its old farmland hinges and open and let in, warm my face, cover me with, Technicolor life. But I know if I open that door, there will only be the smell of carpet fresh and four or five other doors exactly the same and maybe party noises, distant and muffled from down the hall.

SS