I went back to a painting I let move me so many years ago. Perhaps it was before South Africa. A permanent collection painting hangs in the lowest level of the National Gallery of Art and it covers an entire wall. I walked up to it, knowing just where it stood, and slowly sat down in front of it, turning my head just when I was placed perfectly. I had to see it. It is entitled "Hope is Wanting to Pull Clouds". The first time I set eyes on it was when Hope was a large part of my mental existence. It is interesting to note that now I don't let 'hope' enter my vocabulary as often when I chat with myself. Hope is such a fragile, personal, and sometimes frustrating object.



The painting depicts a man pulling down on two ropes, and he has them wrapped around his forearms. He is wearing clothing that shows him to be a swashbuckler from the 18th century or earlier. He has a feather in his hat! There's a sword in his waist and his clothes are tattered. This must mean he expects danger at times and steps out in front of where it's supposedly safe. Oh, he's a man of great vivacious movement. He stands on some beach pulling down on these ropes with his face turned away from the viewer and upward. The ends of the ropes are wrapped around two different clouds, and the clouds seem to be resisting the pull sturdily. Oh, how clouds can be so solid sometimes! And on the horizon, in the blotchy distance a little ways, there's a small one-man sailboat with one man in it. What's he doing? He's looking up, but why is he there? What's on his mind? Lone sailor into the wind, going somewhere, and will probably end up far from here?doesn't he intend to pull clouds? Alone, so alone. Wanting to Pull Clouds is all there really is to do, when everything burns down and physical pleasures lose their value.

Hope is a thing I've had. I hoped for things I wanted, and I hoped for good fortune in achieving them, and with a little effort and a little chance, I've gotten everything I'd ever hoped for. Now hope seems like a child's joke. Knock Knock! Who's there? Me of the past. Now I've perhaps become a little arrogant about it all. I get what I want, I don't care about money, I care about experiences and I've come a long way since I first sat on the bench in front of that painting. I need more to hope for. I need to revive my innocence all the time. Being thrown into the unknown is always good for wiping me clean of arrogance. Maybe send me to live in Turkmenistan without a clue in the world, and I'll hope for the gold of life.

( how I single-handedly brought down the authority of museum security guards and other tales of male idiots )

Balla is stranded in Singapore. In the airport? who knows. I am a little worried but he seems to be enjoying himself. He had the coutrtesy to write me a vague email about it.

I saw an ad about AIDS on the metro today and I thought "now, that's a romanticized picture of a South African man in the township." I remembered a man I knew named Andrew. I met him in Mabopane, outside Pretoria. I was visiting my friend's house for the weekend, Adelaide. Adelaide had dated Andrew but broke up with him because he had a gun. He wore a scarf on his head and talked like his brain cells had been killed off with substances and his teeth needed a little work, but he was handsome. He wasn't a poster boy. He was too clean to look poor enough to deserve UICEF donations, but too dirty to look like some who deserves AIDS help from a distant benefactor in D.C..

Andrew and Adelaide, where are they now? Hopefully not in the grave. Mev. Bredenkamp used to scold Adelaide incessantly. She would stand up for her classmates. They would be droning on in Sotho or Tswana, yelling, but being real. The white teacher wouldn't understand. Mev. Bredenkamp owns a bungalow-style backpackers near our school that has thatched roofs and she treats the black kids like monsters. But she knows they are smart. Too smart. They are defiant and smart enough to cause chaos. Adelaide was constantly scolded but she was among the most clever. I hope she made it somewhere good.

I feel afraid of change. I want to go into it alone, with only me to hang on to. I don't want baggage, or someone else depending on me. Why can't I disappear sometime? I'd be one of those daughters who shows up on the doorstep fifteen years later, because I heard my mother was dying. I'd have lived in a shack somewhere, working at a canoe rental, and creating things.

I remembered today a feeling of deep love I once had for my South African host family. it's strange now to imagine that I was living in a new family, as a regular family member, for one year. A whole year of my life. I was thinking average things like 'which way should i walk home, and should I wear my skirt or my pants for my school uniform today?'

People looked through my diary. I have always kept journals. They mistook my words and scraped my soul, like they would against the asphalt next to their pool. I had nightmares about lions for two months after that. I got to the point where I could tame them. Then, five months after that, in the new family, the night terrors began.

I took my dog for a walk in the snow yesterday, and he seemed so content. It was the epitamy of contentment. an orgasm of existence. He looks like a little yeti in the snow; he eats it, gets in on him, just revels in it. I thought "this is what he was made for." He's a Tibetan terrier, he was meant for snow.

I thought, what am i meant for? there's got to be something for each one of us that we were truly made for. We have to look deep into ourselves somehow and see what kind of animal we are, to help us find our right path that we were always meant to take.

"I often fall in love to boys...without guys i can't live." HAHAHAHA, reject.

The ex-con guy, among other things, turns out to have worked as a male gigolo for some time when he was my age. HAHAHAHA