TUESDAY MORNING, JUNE 13, A.D. 2000
I want to free myself from thought: non cogito ergo sum.
I want a blowjob from Aphrodite.
I want midnight-blue sapphire cuff-links.
I want a VHS copy of the video for Tonino Carotone's "Me Cago en el Amor."
I want seven million dollars.
I want a little stone cottage amid lush trees and garden.
I want every breath to be one of gratitude and of love and of serenity.
At the moment, nothing more comes immediately to mind.
- NICK TOSCHES
LATER TUESDAY MORNING, JUNE 13, A.D. 2000
I want long life, four score and more.
I want my friends to thrive and my oppressors to perish.
I want an opium den of my own.
- NICK TOSCHES
YOUTH
For many years, I felt that my youth had been wasted. I spent my adolescence
drinking, taking dope, robbing, and fucking around, when I could have been
learning to fluently read Sappho and Thomas Mann in the original. But, while
I still feel that it would be wonderful to fluently read Sappho and Thomas
Mann in the original, I no longer feel that my youth was wasted. For with
age comes the wisdom that it all comes down to ashes in the end. Mary
Barnard's rendering of Sappho, along with what little Greek I possess;
William Trask's rendering of Mann's Die Betrogene: these are enough for one,
such as myself, who was long ago written off for dead. My youth, as I see it
now, was spent as it should have been spent. I am alive, and as I write
this, the pleasant morning of the vast blessing of another day, another
breath, flows through me. I want now to learn to do the tango, so that I can
dance in style on the graves of those of my peers, dropping dead around me
like flies, who lived their youths, and their lives, properly and
salubriously. Mens sana in corpore sano, they say. But a sound mind in a
sound body is but a plain and pretty flower in a plain and pretty vase. The
world is full of such parlour pieces. Fuck them, and prepare thy dancing
shoes, for, having survived my youth, and all that followed, I now enjoy the
gentler madness to whose shore I have been delivered, and I look forward to
tangoing in the graveyard, with you, my darling, or over you.
- NICK TOSCHES
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