Tight, Like a Tiger

Goldmember, that "freaky deeky Dutchman" in the movie of the same name keeps saying things that a manly man is not supposed to say, noticing that Austen Powers is "tight like a tiger." Dr. Evil tells him that he is not supposed to be noticing such things at all, Noooooooo! It is perverted, man observing another man's sexuality, but he does anyway. Here I am, "tight like a tiger," pacing around this apartment.

Self-incarcerated, I have been inside all day long, missing out on a variably brisk spring day, organizing, emailing, organizing, emailing. Paying bills, trying to hunt down a new job. As I pace around and around and around, were you looking into my cage here, you would notice an animal, homo erectus [evil be he who think evil], acting something like a caged, crazed creature. You would observe a being in constant motion, moving around and and around, sitting down, getting up, looking out the windows, sitting down, standing up, walking to the kitchen to snack on something, frequent pit stops to the bathroom. Stopping here, pacing there, moving but pretty much alone with thoughts, rarely on the telephone, prowling. I am wondering, wandering. Reading, and writing and reading and writing, more pondering, more pacing, and so it goes. The daytime version of the sleepless night.

Amazingly or perhaps not, in this small place I go nowhere, but I guess I am not sedentary. You would think I might be fat. I could be thinner, but, I'm in the process of streamlining for summer, in change, in transition and filled with nervous energy, lean and mean. Were things in my life more settled, maybe I would pace less and metabolize more slowly? I have to fight entropy, fight my midriff's thickening genes as I age. I can visualize an aortic aneurism, enlarging as I age. No matter that this makes little medical sense. What I know is that I cannot eat without a drink. Food always traps itself in my esophagus without a lubricant to flush it down. A surgeon uncle warned me about his operation to prevent a rupture, and of how his brother died from one. He told me the the odds for surviving an aneurism are "one in twenty" and the odds from dying of preventive surgery are about the same. So I pace. I think. I write. Therefore I am. I look at the creeping clock. At times it postively crawls. Other times, I could not possibly wind it as fast as it flies, minutes like seconds, hours like minutes, round and round.

I am intermittantly manic, depressed. It is the plight of the artist, I accept, and the project of my genes. I must go out now, into the world. I must find my daughter as the schoolday, now turned into sports practice afternoon, draws to its end. I must figure out what's for dinner, whether to watch the mens' NCAA basketball championships tonight. Clearly, there are no forseeale big decisions for me today, beyond whether to drink wine or have a rum and lime and whatever's handy to cut the drink instead. I can watch the athletes, tight like tigers, leap and run and spin and heterosexual that I am, tomorrow I can watch the women play for their national championship, those tight, tawny tigresses, remark upon what I see without fear of Dr. Evil's censure. They are caged images inside my televison set and I am caged in my apartment and the seemingly limitless suite of rooms of my mind.