Dear blague,

Partly I really want to read that new Patti Smith book about her and Mapplethorpe hanging out in New York at the end of the sixties, being crazy kids and loving each other and making art and being bohemian poor and all that, and partly I don't, because I think it'll make me sad. I read a few pages when it first appeared, and oddly there was a scene very close to something that happens in Red Dragon (the book & movie, though it's omitted from Manhunter, go figure), in which Bob Mapplethorpe steals a Wm. Blake print for sale in the gallery where he's working, and then he feels so afraid of being caught that he shreds it up and flushes it down a toilet, which is pretty close to shredding it up and ingesting it, depending on how you think of bodies. I liked that part, but anyway I feel conflicted about reading the book because that camaraderie thing, that being young and foolish and loving somebody thing, that just gets me feeling sad because hello, I live with my parents in what are supposed to be the foolish & exciting years, I average one poem every six months if I'm lucky, and I don't even get in any impressive fights like Bukowski. Not that I really want to. But in the other part I read, Patti Smith said how she had come home early one day when she & Mapplethorpe were both unemployed (how they managed to keep the heat on is beyond my imagining) and made her special soup for him, which was just chicken broth with lettuce floated on top, and it's meant to sound kind of sad and sweet and raga--

Let me just interject, I don't know how my coworker gets to be sitting down and not answer the phone right now; the unspoken agreement is that if you're sitting and somebody else is standing, the least you can do is field all the phone calls and leave everybody else's hands free. But maybe that should be a spoken rule.

Whatever, my point is I find young unpretentious love stories depressing, especially when it's forty years later and the remaining half of the couple is still way cooler than everybody.

And then again, "unpretentious" is a malleable concept, because I know if I met somebody my age right now who was hanging around Rimbaud's grave and talking all mystical-poetry business, I would be like OH SHUT UP, because when it's somebody you perceive to be like you and not everybody's chosen punk-rock elder god, it's annoying. I guess my definition of being unpretentious is having highfalutin tastes that you don't tell anybody about, because you're doing it for you and not to impress anybody. But really, trying to impress people is a part of life, and so is talking to people about things that interest you, so what do I know.