Good Morning Lizard:



Just a quick note to say hello and good morning. I am trying to get onto a "schedule," like they do for babies: you know: wake up at a certain time, eat at a certain time, etc. My "schedule" for the past few years has been pure chaos, because that felt like freedom to me. But now I'm thinking there might be some freedom in a routine. When you have a routine, you rarely feel weak with hunger. You also sleep better. You go to the bathroom at the same times. Your body likes it. And you just don't have to think about boring stuff so much, like cooking. You just do it and that's all.



Speaking of Lenny Bruce, on Thanksgiving night on KXLU they played "To Is A Preposition Come Is A Verb," one of Lenny Bruce's most beautiful routines. If you aren't familliar with it, it's sort of a quasi-beatnik free-association wordplay with a pseudo-jazz accompaniment--I think he's hitting a drum and a cymbal or some shit. He's riffing on the words "to come." It's gorgeous no matter what state you're in, but if you're on mushrooms or any other psychotropic, it's extra-special, because the rhythm of his speech perfectly follows the whimsical double-helices of thought that occur on these drugs. I know because I was having my very first psychedelic drug trip when I discovered him.



This was back when Jake, my roommate, and I were high school sweethearts. My parents went out of town and we bought some mushrooms from that guy Xander, the guy I mentioned before from the Circle Jerks, haw haw! Anyway, so we took the shrooms by crumbling them into Prego spaghetti sauce and making spaghetti. We were always eatiing spaghetti. Prego had just come out. Prego was the best thing ever. Anyway, so we're just kind of hanging out in the TV room at my parents' house on Third Avenue in Koreatown, and we turn on the radio. Somewhere on the left of the dial, probably KPFK, we heard this guy rambling, rambling rambling, in this high New York kind of voice, super-Jewish, and we're just digging his voice, because Jake's Jewish and I'm a total Jew-lover, and you never hear a really Jewish voice on the radio. But then we actually listen to what he's saying, and he's talking about something vaguely familiar--I don't remember the routine but it was classic Lenny Bruce: At once completely coherent and 100 percent high out of his mind. You follow the druggy pathways of his thoughts and if you're high the connections are effortless, because they're often the sort of childhood thought-connections that you start to remember when you do psychedelics. Children think in original but completely reasonable ways.



Anyway, so then I remembered my folks had a Lenny Bruce album: "What I Was Arrested For," a compilation of the performances that got him arrested for obscenity, including "To Is A Preposition Come Is A Verb," "I Just Do It And That's All," "Tukuses and Nay Nays," "Pissing In The Sink" (or whatever it's called), and "Dirty Toilet Joke."



I love him so.



Now I have to go to Target now to buy fairy lights.



Love,

Kate



























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