Limited, Inc.

Postcards of travel. I’m in a hotel in Bayside San Diego. The Midway looms out the window to the left, massive, and kept in great shape, externally, so that tourists get a chance to see what those old floating fortresses from the big one were all about. Earlier, I’d taken Adam down to see it and was surprised and overjoyed to see some instances of true Republican Party art – an art that evokes warm patriotic feelings through the kind of unabashed kitsch which is so vulnerable to mockery that it doesn’t deserve even to be mocked. One was an enormous painted statue that took the famous iconic moment of the sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-E day – when Americans were under the delusion that they were celebrating the end of the war in Europe – and monumentalized it,  the woman bent in the man’s arms, dressed in a short white skirt and with white stockings, the sailor in blue, his sailor hat on his curly head, his mouth about the size of my arm from the hand to the elbow o

We are traveling in the Boulder Denver area this weekend. Denver has wonderful houses and a lotta rain, and I got sick yesterday. I took some pills, we put Adam to bed, then I lay down to sleep and had this dream. I was at a comic book festival. I was with three people. The only one in focus was a tall, geeky looking guy – who I began to see was Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais’s partner on the Extras. He gave me a computer to write things on, but whatever I wrote appeared on the screen as something different, in Greek or Cyrilac script. I got mad and, like Adam, threw the computer down. Later Stephen told me this was a test, and then he revealed that I was being inducted into the CIA. He introduced me to the man with him – Richard Nixon. Nixon was much shorter than I expected. He had a sour look on his face. He was wearing a sweater that I somehow recognized. It was cream colored with brown braiding, very thick, with a sort of ruff, or turtleneck. It was, in short, the kind of sweater