What else are we going to do?

I asked Joe Goode the painter if he would keep making paintings in his 80s.

At the time I asked him he'd just turned 70.

"What else am I going to do? " Joe said.

I died in a dream the other night. Upon my death I am supposedly 'admitted' to heaven and taken there in an ambulance escorted by a squad of police cars, a cortege accompanied by wailing sirens. When we arrive at heaven's gate the guard says I can't enter because I'm not wearing a face mask. Angry that I'm still human, I threaten to take the story to PBS Frontline.

By 3 am, alone in the house, walking around sleepless, I feel like a thief looking for fishbones and not the actual fish. A news report says someone is disturbing swallow's nests in Napa, poking the nests from beneath the highway overpasses in which they lodge, then stomping on the baby swallows who've fallen out of the nests.

The city's going to come to light soon, a beautiful sight I'd rather not see. I'd rather be asleep and to wake up at a reasonable hour, refreshed, having coffee brought to me by someone I love and who loves me.

Having lived well past the Age of Anxiety, I create the Age of Apology. It works like this: I get up every morning determined to look only for intelligent signs of intelligent life, and see instead creepazoidal creatures made up of infectious diseases holding military parades in Russia, China, and the USA. Father Zosima from one of Dostoyevsky's novels says I needn't worry, that if I can write a poem that begins with the words, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry" all my sins will be absolved.

Staying in bed longer than I usually do, accompanied by the pile of books that now sleep with me, I pick up one of the books at random. I'm sorry to say that I've become a name dropper reader, and so put down the book by the man who says things that shouldn't be said (anonymous)  for the book by the woman who says things that need to be said (Adler). I stay in bed until the bed begins to growl.

Then I eat some color for breakfast, a little yellow if depressed and blue if hungover, and get to work. What else am I going to do?

 "Foghorns" (after Arthur Dove), painting-in-progress, acrylic and oil on canvas," 24" X" 32." Photo by author.