Why, O why does the Amsterdam of my dreams always include a fictitious museum district between the Red Light district and the outer canals? And why, in my recent dreams of the place, is my mother always there? (I like traveling with my mom, but I don't think either of us would much enjoy a trip to Amsterdam together.)

The paper didn't come again this morning. I had to cover a 9am-11am shift at the church, so I was up too early to notice the quality of my coffee. I did manage to compose this ditty, with deepest apologies to Dorothy Parker:

O life is a comforting, cushioning pad
Whose days seldom offer much drama;
And love is a thing that can never go bad,
And I am Michelle R. Obama.

Oh, and happy birthday to Neil. Take me birding on your Jet-Ski in my dreams again soon, OK?

I am thinking quite seriously of seeing if I can get an appointment with my old orthopedist. He used to tell me flat-out that he couldn't do anything for me but prescribe, which was at least honest. He treated me with the same mixture of pity and contempt that most doctors do when you tell them you hurt and want narcotic painkillers, but he was politer about it than most.

Maybe I'll say I fell through the floor of a house. That is how I fucked up my back 17 years ago. The funny thing is that this story is far more plausible in post-K New Orleans than it was in undamaged Athens, GA, where it actually happened.

The worst thing about being in physical pain all the time isn't the minute-to-minute pain itself; it's the cumulative effect of it, which builds up and wears you out. Sometimes I look at a flight of stairs and have to give myself a pep talk before I can climb it, just because I am so goddamn tired. My God, I think of myself as "old" now even though chronologically I am not; what will life be like when I am really old, these problems are ten times worse, and government restrictions have made it even more impossible for doctors to provide any relief? (I don't look for any great developments in non-narcotic painkillers; I was one of the early patients to try that wonderful new invention, Celebrex, which cost me hundreds of dollars more than Vicodin, didn't do a damn thing for me, and was recently pulled from the market for causing fatal heart attacks.)

I still can't sit at my desk long enough to get anything of significance done; whatever work I've done over the past week or so has been done in bed. Hell, that's where Truman Capote did every bit of his writing, and ... I can't think of a good end to that sentence. I liked Truman better before I learned that he didn't invite Dorothy Parker, then in her seventies, to his Black and White Ball even though she all but requested an invitation.

There's a wind tonight. I hate all wind now. The only good thing about wind is that it can blow away fog. I hate fog worse than anything.

In her lonely old age, in the catalog for an art exhibit, Dorothy Parker wrote one of the saddest passages I've ever read:

I am always a little sad when I see a John Koch painting. It is nothing more than a bit of nostalgia that makes my heart beat slower -- nostalgia for those rooms of lovely lights and lovelier shadows and loveliest people. And I really have no room for the sweet, soft feeling. Nor am I honest, perhaps, in referring to it. For it is the sort of nostalgia that is only a dreamy longing for some places where you never were.

And, I never will be there. There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

Note to self upon completing interview for Apex Digest: Reading biographies of Dorothy Parker vastly improves the quality of one's interview replies, or at least makes one imagine so at the time.

In truth, "The Maid-Servant at the Inn" is probably overly sentimental; I've always liked it because I find it difficult, knowing what Jesus was going to do and what was going to happen to him, to view the Nativity as a scene of transcendent joy. There is that, of course, but there is also the terrible foreknowledge. Even if you don't believe in it all, which I'm not sure I do, it is an appallingly sad story.

(Meanwhile, Chris brings me an Easter greeting card with a picture of a crucified Christ and a bunny offering him a chocolate egg: "Have an egg, you'll feel better!" Inside, it says, "If you laughed at this card, you are going to Hell.")

Anyway, Dorothy Parker's great strength in verse was not the sentimental stuff she wrote for the newspapers, but the clever, frequently self-mocking doggerel of the sort I also enjoy doing occasionally (though she was my superior times a million). Here's one I like better by her:

Portrait of the Artist

Oh, lead me to a quiet cell
Where never footfall rankles,
And bar the window passing well,
And gyve my wrists and ankles.

Oh, wrap my eyes with linen fair,
With hempen cord go bind me,
And, of your mercy, leave me there,
Nor tell them where to find me.

Oh, lock the portal as you go,
And see its bolts be double ...
Come back in half an hour or so,
And I will be in trouble.