Fear of dancing wildebeest-like at the winter ball, scandalizing the style minister, sweating, trampling hems, toppling hats, all at once naked, spotlit, shunned, is, I’m pleased to say, treatable, with a course of therapeutically guided nightmares in which, with practice, you can blithely attend to routine dream anxieties: codes, charts, exacting, repetitious procedures loosely related to consumer electronics, public arts administration, maritime logistics—a wobbly gas ball from which depends the merest comforts of your sleeping life, such as, so the therapeutic nightmare guidelines suggest, that of watching the umbrella drink vacation slideshows of everyone you’ve ever met, and many you haven’t, along with home movies of these people, their terriers, toddlers, culinary triumphs, spooling on to nightmare infinitudes, the comfort of your deep, dreamed chair as outside the snow swirls, slushes, bees maraud, leaves drop, and again, until the sweat has dried, the spotlight moved on, your state of dress no concern to high officials, or anyone, the winter ball a scene in a snow globe heavy as the world you need no longer fear having the strength, the wildness, to shake.
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Pretty prose. I love it when bees maraud.
"your state of dress no concern to high officials, or anyone, the winter ball a scene in a snow globe heavy as the world you need no longer fear having the strength, the wildness, to shake." Far less gloomy take than Prufrock. Thank you for this.