Being an artist leaves your time free for all sorts of procrastinations. Anything can seem easier than looking inside at your soul and regurgitating it in all its ugliness for the cruel masses....cleaning the bathroom is easier. Training for a marathon is easier. Taking stray cats to the pound is easier.

The mail comes around noon. Normally I've awakened with the best artistic intentions several hours before that. I'm still tired from working late, but I make a nice hot cuppa coffee and settle into my sure-thing day with the newspaper. When will I learn? All intentions are aborted as the newspaper infuriates me into paralysis with its stories of wealth and poverty, idiocy, insolence, death, travel, love, lives...little capsules with all the interesting details and none of the horrifying day-to-day minutiae of read-the-paper and get-the-mail...

By the time the paper's been tossed angrily on the floor, the depression and futility of trying to create something out of nothing is all-encompassing. It's clearly hopeless, and worthless. It's impossible to come up with anything with half as much pathos as the driest article in the Business Times, so WHY BOTHER?

~LIFE IS SO GOOD~

But the mail. That's the nail in the coffin. Every day a deluge of catalogs arrives, prescribing a lifestyle that accompanies their wool sweaters, cotton trousers, silk chemises. And yeah, it looks pretty fuckin good! How many more goddamn wool sweaters do I have to order, J. Crew, until I too will live in post-collegiate bliss? When will I be one of those young folks on the docks of their old money boat launches, with pastel fisherman's caps, flip-flops, and serene smiles? Or the funky girl, who mixes patterns, wears boots, and pulls her stocking hat down to her eyes? I guess I'd be willing to try her on for size. I mean, she's obviously not as serene, a bit more tortured, perhaps, but still fully functional.

But oh, to be among the loft-livers, who inhabit those immaculate, airy spaces and are always photogenic with their perpetually post-yoga glow, their easy fit outfits, their easy fit lives.... with masculine mates in soft rugged sweaters who laugh and sip coffee between rolling in bed, biking around the city to get you flowers, and gazing casually at architectural drawings in ultra-hip offices.

"When we, my happy and masculine best friend mate and I, finally suit up and leave our aerie, it is to climb into our vintage auto or euro-retro wagon and frolic in the great outdoors with thin friends and fishing rods. It is so nourishing, so right. We even have a black friend. She loves down parkas and cashmere twin-sets. She smiles a lot and enjoys coffee out of antique tin mugs, too. Life is so good."

After some time in the tanning bed, ninety minutes with the makeup girl and fifteen pounds worth of bonbons and cosmopolitans, we're in Victoria's Secret. And wow how things have changed! Maybe I've got some serious hang-ups, but I just don't see how I'll ever morph from made-up fuck toy with come hither everything to rugged yet serene post-ivy post-yoga outdoor girl with a change of clothes. I try damn hard in my real life to incorporate it all, but only wind up needing to be heavily medicated. Will I ever be able to separate these dueling women from each other, live in luxurious serenity one day and then be rabidly sexual, lounging in lingerie, the next?

I'm sure my doctor will get my meds right one of these days, and when he does, STAND BACK.

It is a wonderful, wonderful life.

Where's my Visa....