A Different Kind of Artist

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
—Mark Twain

Ever wake up with that delightful feeling of spongebrain after drinking a bottle of red wine? It's not quite as painful as a full-fledged whiskey hangover (though those can sometimes result in a tunnel of contemplative giddy). No, this means you can't sleep in, your stomach feels hollow, and you love yourself. Eggs are the only thing that matter, and the steak and eggs breakfast at Jake's could most likely be the only thing on earth to make you humble again (besides 24 hours and a good night's sleep, but I have the night off, so that probably won't happen.) Soon I will go there alone with a paper.

Anywho, hangovers always get me thinking about Bonnie, who you see here. She lives in my building and Jeremy once saw her half-naked (the bottom half). I can hear her now, sorting bottles, clinking their stinky and hollow shapes against each other. Once she gave us a grocery sack full of giant plastic jugs of vodka, accompanied with a note explaining why she could not keep them. She left them on our doorstep like a baby at a nunnery. I think she might have again picked up the habit of keeping and emptying similar jugs (which I totally understand), but I have no proof.

Bonnie lives in my building. Sometimes she can be mean, but most of the time she is in her own world. From what I understand, she is kind of a danger to herself, but she isn't dead yet, so good for her. She used to be institutionalized(?). She screams things like "Life is a horror story," and "I'm a fat cow," though she hasn't been doing that with as much frequency as when I first met her. Her family is affluent(?). Her main goals in life are to collect and redeem bottles, and to bitch about people parking in her parking space, even though she can't drive and doesn't own a car.

Bonnie is a reminder of what I (or anyone) could possibly become, though I seriously doubt that I would have the resolve to regularly sweep the street with a whispy broom and tell people to "fuck off, I'm working" when they ask me to get out of the middle of the road so they can drive by in their cars. I'm not saying I'm on the verge of flipping out or submitting to life-consuming addiction, but if I just stopped trying, it wouldn't take long for me to be homeless and crazy (Bonnie isn't homeless, but I think someone helps her, perhaps her aforementioned affluent (?) family). She understands no reality but her own. Neither do I, frankly.