The chair is not as small as I thought it would be. Ray Soleil and I had more than one moment of mutually concealed despair. The arms were a quarter-inch wider than the doorway and they wouldn’t give no matter what. In the end, it took an extreme deployment of body English, probably enough to get you arrested in public. But we were home. Later, when Fossil Darling sat in it, he looked exactly like Mao Zedong. Mao in shorts and a pressed blue shirt, but Mao nonetheless. Do I look like Mao when I sit in the chair?

It’s a very comfortable chair. If I could, I’d tell you all about it, but at the moment — what a week of celebration this has been! —I can hardly speak English. Nevertheless we have the chair. The totally Mao chair. Maybe it will help to remember my radicals.

***

The foregoing, WUI, was a desperate bid to clock an entry on an ordinary weekday that was working out anyway but ordinary. All day yesterday (I’m writing on the fifth), I mean to tidy up my scribbling, and add a more substantial paragraph or two, but I much preferred to read in the bedroom while Kathleen sorted through closets and drawers and eventually packed for her trip to Maine. We celebrated the Fourth by having dinner at the Café d’Alsace, where Kathleen forgot how plentifully filling the bowls of gazpacho are — meals unto themselves, really — until she was halfway through the plate of John Dory that came after. I reveled in steak tartare, brightly seasoned to counter its inherent richness; most satisfying.

After dinner, I finished reading Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy (written with Michael Stone). Fischl never mentions television, but I found myself thinking about it, rather fiercely, as I turned the pages.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 4th, 2013 at 1:30 am.