275. The Status of Primary Colors

The red in orange is slightly embarrassed, having consorted with yellow. Whereas the red in purple thinks a lot of itself. The privilege of working with blue, and all of that. As to the red in pink, it will not brook criticism of any kind. White works for it, red-in-pink claims. Pink is beautiful, pink is better than red! it cries. It's this kind of thinly veiled self-loathing which the community of red cannot abide. At the same time, it's this alleged community that red in brown sought to escape when it disappeared into green. It lives there humbly now.


hans ostrom 2020

274. Rude Dream

Well, that dream spat me out like a wheezing cat--leaving me stranded in a tangle of sheets and angst. Something about a packed subway car full of snarling belligerence. Then came a Hollywood-propped drawing room--walls of books, read draperies--full of accusatory ex-lovers I don't/didn't/mustn't recognize (hence the accusations?). Finally a scuffle of worries, a flurry of muffled voices, a storm of squalid fretting misers who form  a sarcastic chorus singing of me and my failures and low-level fuck-ups. Plus as I try to wallow around toward awake, I can't confront my subconscious mind because it takes such pique and invests it, reaps synaptic profits, and spends them on professional plaid-clad sleep-tormentors, talking statues, and loquacious apples blabbing at a cocktail party full of rapidly moving eyeballs, tremulous eyelids, and sweat glands, and now I push myself through the crack between dreaming and not-dreaming, and am exhausted, which is not the aim of sleep, I would argue, if my mind weren't clogged. Fogged.