She slips her cool bouquet of fingers into my hand.

Well hello dead blog! Hello blog on life support, and no I am not doing anything in my power to resuscitate, so it goes! You go on limping, I go on limping, we go on limping together but in separate hobbles to the same distant, unreachable sunset! The sunset that is so mournfully glorious! The sunset you don't want to end but you need to, because if it didn't it would just be a bruised and lame day. All of you, it would be a bruised and lame day.

No, I am not drunk! I am not drunk yet!

But what I do have to report is this: there is so-so story full of the kind of language that makes you long for the days when this language we all speak was new on our lips, and everything we said was for the first time. I mean this--

Now it's dark. This is an instant when the carnival lights have finally bullied the sun away, and the sky glows the colors of infection. The egrets notice, and all at once they flee the drainage canal behind the parking lot. They settle, pale and watchful, in the high limbs of the live oak trees behind the Giant Wheel, but they cannot sleep with the midway lights on them. For a time, the trees are whitely restless with the labor of the egrets stowing and unstowing anxious wings.

Now how about that? Even my impending return to San Francisco, nearly hobbled by weepy dreams yes weepy dreams where I, as Spiderman, weep at the thought of flinging spiderwebs from my wrists onto the next building because five moments after I do I'll be floating in an arc in full sight of the Bay, of the Bridge, of any number of hills that last summer, in the full and warm light of the love that was then blossoming in my heart for that inanimate city--I was crying, in my dreams as Spiderman I was crying because I would see her again, this City I've been away from for so long--even now, at this incipient moment, my heart is stayed by the writing representative of which is the above paragraph. A section of this story begins with this paragraph, and ends with a paragraph that begins with,

The felonious old electricity crackles in my groin.

Hoo boy. Check out this month's Harper's. As the Olde Windbag is of course now gone...