The Young Woman in the Off Red Dress

In keeping my distance I most effectively preserved her image as she stood reflecting yet another west-end sunset from her golden sunglasses, red nails, perfect teeth, perfect feet, painted lips, and red pumps, all subordinated to the off red dress and the vessel beneath which it lay contoured and loose and straight and perfect.  Just perfect.  Within  the concavity of my spinning mind that draws into its vortex feigned notions of happiness and contentment and love and peace and harmony and euphoria, I mused whether taking a step in her direction would have made a difference; that I might not disrupt the image created in part by the proximity that stood.  A difference.  A difference, like the difference it would make if I packed up and rode my 650 to California and sat in the same booth at the diner with my daughter in Hollywood named the House of Pies.  As soon as I would sit I would realize, would I not, that no appreciable difference had been effected on account of my ride, and on account of the image that would have otherwise been well-preserved had I stood back and observed it from a this long distance.  The young woman in the off red dress is like that.  She represents desire, and vanity, and all those distractions that would in the end most certainly make a difference, and the difference would be destructive.  The difference would be draped in off black, and sadness, and deeper desires that would take me into even deeper shades of dark black and off darkenss.

Did I mention that just beyond the young woman was the entrance to a funeral parlor where there lay the dead body of a young man around whom stood his mourners and sisters and lovers and widower father?  Did I mention that the young woman in the off red dress did not go in?  Instead, she stood.  She stood like a statue adorned on either side by white columns and a vestibule made for somber fashionable ingress and somber egress.  So there she stood, like a sail.  Like a centerpiece.  She was not sad.  She might as well have not known where she was because it didn't matter.  She knew well.  Confidence.  The confidence that vanity ignites creates desire.  It is all vanity.  It is all imagery.  It is artwork.  I no longer hunt or gather so I am left idle drift from image to image until I am alas assuaged of my desire to look.  Then I sleep.  To the faithful I request:  Thank God for me that I may sleep.  Sleep it off.  Sleep off the fear and the pain and suspicion and the dread and the desire that the young woman in the off red dress represents to me.  By morning I will have that clarity to conclude that her taste was woefully off.  What a garish act to wear an almost orange dress to a goddamn funeral parlor.  What an ego-driven little vixen she must be.  What nerve!

But long she stood and soaked into her orbit every wandering eye within her peripheral colorguard.  Her stark pose.  Her teeth within red lips barely moving above and below, beneath golden sunglasses, red nails, perfect teeth, perfect feet, and red pumps, all subordinated to the off red dress and the vessel beneath which it lay contoured and loose and straight and perfect.  Just perfect.  "Desire Ye Not, Ye Middle Aged Man".  Who said that?  Who the fuck said that?  I did.  I am the fool who said that.  But it did not come from me.  I am nevertheless grateful that it emanated from these half century old and throaty chords of mine.  I will not be undone by the young woman in the off red dress.  And so I move on to the next successive set of images.  These are the ones that matter.  I am home.  To the faithful I request:  Thank your Gods that I am home.  Thank your Gods that I am safe.  Thank your Gods for the ever increasing distance between the young woman in the off red dress and me.  I am home.  But I concede it would be a safer here if I weren't.