Saturday, July 21, 2012

Alive but alone


I cannot imagine the provenance of this, though I do remember carefully cutting it out of TV Guide sometime in the late '90s, putting it in a book, and forgetting about it. Then, much later, rediscovering it by accident and scanning it.

I cannot imagine what sort of TV show this would advertise.

What happened is, I was photoshopping some pictures, my finger slipped, and suddenly all the photos in the file just vanished.  In the same instant a new file popped up, or should I say a very old one, pictures from the deep past that I had long ago given up for dead. I had either misfiled them, or they had disappeared into another dimension.

Et voila. Somehow, for some reason, they popped back through the portal into the Now. This picture, which I sometimes wondered about and was beginning to treat like someone who was lost in a war, was back in my hands.

Perhaps everything does happen at once, the past is really the present, and Einstein is looking at us all with his enigmatic little smile. I can't figure out the huge-eyed forlorn boy puppet holding the awful grimacing mask, his skeletal wooden joints
and threadbare clothing.

Who does he think he is? Who is he trying to be? And why is he back here looking at me now?

9 comments:

  1. I attended an Auden reading at the U. of Wis. many moons ago. He did not strike me as a gregarious man.

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  2. Except Dylan Thomas, who sounded like a phantom wailing on the moors.

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  3. Christopher Hitchens was a dead ringer for Thomas toward the end.

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  4. Replies
    1. I don't think he insulted his brain quite as much or as heavily.

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  5. Yes. Death at 39 is grim. Even Richard Burton made it to 59, but he had women looking after him. His last two (much younger) wives were more like nursemaids. And HOW did Dorothy Parker make it to 72?? She drank the men under the table and was less than 5' tall. (Almost wrote 5". Such a cute little vindictive leprechaun.)

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