I’m blue this morning.

I miss Sarah-Katherine, though I never knew her all that well. I’m still sad about not moving to New York City with her, though I know San Francisco is ten times better for me.

Got a voice mail from Margaret, an ex with issues I haven’t heard from in a long while. She says, “My daughter liked you, and my sister liked you, and I kind of liked you, miss you, and wonder if you miss me.”

Yeah, I like you, Maggie, but I can only handle one crazy person in my life, and he’s me.

I kind of miss everyone I’ve ever known and moved away from — family and old friends in Seattle, Louie and Kallie and Carlotta at Macy’s, Judith and Lugosi in Berkeley… These days, people come into my life for a few months, maybe a year, and then they’re gone.

Asked Corina on a date, but I asked by mail so the answer will be slow coming, and I’m pretty sure she’ll turn me down. I’m fat and ugly and have bad breath, but the zine is fairly popular, and why don’t zinesters have groupies?

Sometimes I wonder how my mom’s doing, and a voice in my head tells me to give her a call. We haven’t spoken in eleven months, and I tell the voice to shut up, because Mom makes me mental. But I feel bad about being vanished from her world.

So many reasons to be blue, and of course, I’m still devastated because little Jessica’s plane crashed…

So today’s a day I’d rather stay in bed, but instead I gotta make the long BART commute and then walk to Telegraph Ave and sell fish.

♦ ♦ ♦

Waiting for the train to Berkeley, the BART station was packed with radicals, feminists, hippies, and pinkos in general, all carrying banners and placards and talking earnestly in clusters of two to half a dozen.

At noon there’ll be a big March downtown for abortion rights, and I might’ve liked to have gone to the rally myself. If women don’t have the right to abortion, entirely their choice, then it’s bogus saying women have any rights at all.

But I gotta work, and anyway, the courts and Congress don’t really care that people rally in San Francisco.

Instead I sat at a folding table all day, and said, “Fish,” and then a minute later, “Funny fish,” and a minute after that, “Fish stickers and magnets,” and then “Fish” again.

Those are my usual lines, but today it was literally a minute between lines. I set my little Casio watch to beep every minute and remind me to say the next line, and amused myself by saying nothing but those four lines all day.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Haven’t seen Danny the economist in weeks. Umberto says he hasn’t seen him either. A homeless man disappears, and who notices? Who cares? To most people the down-and-outers don’t matter, and if one of them’s dead or gone that’s a good thing. Me, I think they’re people, but that seems to be an unpopular perspective.

Pathetic Life
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