Friday, October 02, 2009

I was reading an anthology of several comic strips. The first one was written in, and set in, 1970. The character was describing his car, a beater of the period that he had trouble with but that got forty miles per gallon as long as he didn't drive it too fast. I thought about all the times I'd driven my cars too fast, and not gotten good enough mileage. There were at least two other cartoonists featured in the book. One was a woman with a particularly good one. Can't remember much about it, though.

I was at a party back in Connecticut, in a big, cluttered house, that had been going on for some time, maybe days. Finch arrived at a certain point and we were trying to remember whether one of us had loaned the other twenty dollars the night before to buy drugs. We couldn't figure it out so we let it go. Then it was seven o'clock in the morning. Everyone else was asleep but me and Jesse. I was reading the paper, a little annoyed and bewildered that I was up so early. Jesse was negotiating something with an official person, possibly Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. But this person soon became a woman.