And now I am in the Apple Store in LA trying to catch up on all the things I have to learn and know in these strange climes, Bali having been left behind, and NY and DC but brief interludes. The novel memoir, as I am calling it, that I went to Bali to write is written, and nothing has been lost but my fitness and eyesight, as I didn't get up from the desk for five months until it was finished, so have to start walking(I swam, but that doesn't work your cement muscles) and the eyes are itchy and tired from too much devotion (can there be such a thing?) and maybe a bug, they're checking. Have already lost my new eyedrops($52 generic , God bless America, or at least the drug business,) my purse(found it, it was in my son's car,) and several friends I realized were not friends of the heart(you can hear it in their voices, when you've spent a half year in Bali.) Have no time or appetite for anything but real. After my airport experience and my escape, I really love my country so am trying not to pay attention to any of the shit that's going on here as I know it is only Illusion, and the Truth is, we are all basically divine except people who pretend to love.
Had the frenetic time in NY trying to catch up on the jet lag, went to a birthday party in DC for a loved friend turning older as we all are if we are lucky, but it still hurts, and then found myself Hating, which I hate, but I truly impersonally despise Mark Zuckerberg, whom I don't know, but the people frittering away their lives on Facebook make me sad, as I now understand Life is Short, and my window in Beverly Hills faces Whitney Houston's room at the Hilton, and I think of the incredible dumbness of whoever was handling her death going to Zuckerberg for a reaction, like he was Walt Whitman on Lincoln's assassination, (O Whitney! My Whitney!) just because he made a fortune out of trading on loneliness, no real gifts except Asberger's.
So I broke for lunch with my boy attorney, Burt, who has stayed young and smart for the thirty odd years he has watched over my estate, what there is of it, and I asked him how come he doesn't age, and his theory or rather thesis is if you like what you're doing and it makes you happy, you don't get old. Well I am the living dispute for that argument. I love what I do, and I was always young. I jut don't know what happened. Maybe it was the 19 books that always came out at the wrong time(except one, The PRETENDERS because everybody was ready for sex) like The Motherland, my best book, about Washington, destined for(everyone was sure) greatness but it came out the day that Watergate exploded, and nobody cared about fiction, and now there's SCANDAL with the best cover ever to grace a bookstore window except there are no more bookstores. Still it is a lot of fun, so I hope you all will read it and tell your friends.
But I have, I think/hope just written my best book which I hope will see the light while I still can.
Now I am about to leave the Apple store to which I returned to learn to use my Ipad so I an write on planes if I ever travel again. Thank you all for keeping me going all the time I was in Bali, hard-working and devoted and itching but never leaving my post. My post for the next few weeks, in case anyone wants to call me-- I have lost my telephone book along with remembering all numbers, -- is the Hotel Mosaic, Beverly Hills, the setting for SCANDAL, renamed the Royale for the novel.
I love you all. Whoever you are.
