Sinister: he's a taker and a giver and a getter into a world she's been been hankering to

[figure2 at xxx.net]

I wrote something on the thirteenth and something on the fourteenth and now it's the fifteenth and, you know? Things change every day. A good friend of mine used to say: 'Gordon, don't you think you've just lost the plot a bit?' and I'd shrug 'Whatever... it's not important'.
Do you know the Legend of the Holy Drinker? It's a book by Joseph Roth, about a tramp who was sitting down by the River Seine one day ( the Seine has pavements alongside parts of it a few feet above the water which can be accessed by steps, mainly from the bridges above) when he was approached by a rich man who gave him a lot of money. The book can be taken at the level of  a parable on the capriciousness of wealth and fate but I think the underlying substance is miracles and how people can both suggest and receive them, outwith the purposes of justice or reason.

"I apologise. I presume the state you find me in is less than might be expected of a well brought-up young man. Perhaps I am not longer so young. Such things have passed. Me by, but I am capable of gathering myself to my feet. How long my bipedalifourousness (!) will remain I cannot tell."
Whilst not working out if things he was saying were in the dictionary or not, he imagined palaces of stairs unwounded to heaven... dreamy big marbly echoing voids with possibilities, not festering. That, and, standing up. The fact was, of course, that he was lying upon the pavement in a barely coherent state and staring, bleeding from the left cheekbone and knees, up at a woman in her fifties who was not unfamiliar with the concept of offering assistance to men such as himself. Assured, she departed.
He hailed a taxi to a strip bar. He'd never been there before but knew about it because it was next to the art college and had lusty fifties-style line drawings painted on the outside walls, either side of the door. It was about 11:30am and he sat down at a fine old mahogany shelf next to a man who looked uncannily like Robert Louis Stephenson and the man said to him. "What's great here is the whole place is run entirely by women". Three women stared at the two of them like the girls out of the Murphy's ads... slinky but decidedly not to be tricked with. But the two men had something to tangle with as well, like drizzle on burbly brooks... poet-imagery and painting women; seeing the beginnings of life like artists (their thighs, though the women who ran the place weren't indulging in the blokeishly unreasonable desire for visual exposition, not that the men asked). Maybe rather tired about either hoplessness, addiction or lack of talent but getting along with each other just the same, another half-hour was passed. 

[Souls in the shadows and souls in the lights one other's merely over exposed 
There's as much night as day: owl's have more of one way,
In sentiments we have it three ways,
And I'm in that way.]

He went home and told his Dad a bit before the call-credit ran out.

The miracle went like this:
He received a letter one day and a valentine's two days after. He's sorta shocked and delighted.
Just a dumb man, me, but thankyou, thankyou, thankyou :)

Gordon.
 

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