Skaler's Funeral

Visceral epiphany—self-loathing and self-loving, like a miser wringing his hands with evil delight, and curiously sexy feelings along my crippled left side, along the fault line there. Yes, I'm loving my lovely faults all along my body. Actually, I love the way my body can still bounces back. Despite my great age, strength returned pretty quickly after my being all scrunched up in the car the three hours on the way to Sunwest, and three hours on the way back, from the funeral of my recently self-murdered friend Hans Skaler. There was no rain on the way down nor at the graveside. Perhaps Sal and I met the first mosquitoes of the season there, but nothing terrible. On the way down we listened to Bob Dylan spin songs about the weather on his radio program. On the way back we got some prairie weather ourselve, a regular drenching. We pulled over into the lot of a Petro-Can station. Sal got out because she needed to go to the can. I preferred keeping out of the downpour. She spent a long time in the shop, and the rain stopped. So I went to see what she was about. She was just paying for two coffees, 100% Columbian she said, and a neat egg salad sandwich. She remembered how much I had liked the egg salad sandwiches at the funeral. Seems a nice family, the Skalers, a bit pious maybe but, you know, you can’t be sure. At funerals where you let the religious boys take over (and that’s easy to do, isn’t it) everybody seems fully assured Christ is taking care of us all, living and dead. Nowhere in the little hymn book they passed out was there anything somebody from my church (which was Hans' church at the end) could sing with a good conscience. what a pile of crap really! But I love funerals and people at funerals and love the men and women who work them. I love all bodies connected with the entertainment business really. That is my bottom line. entertainment. Really it is. And sorry I am if my little literary splurges don’t entertain you. I would have preferred to be entertained than taught all those years in school. No, I liked being taught sometimes too. But it was entertainment that I wanted and always entertainment. Wow my typing with my left hand there felt really fluent. I mean I was typing with both my hands, but it was my left hand knew where it wanted to go.