Reading Edward Gorey makes me wish I were a dissolute, disreputable, mad, bad and dangerous to know fallen European aristocrat somewhere in the 19th century.
The decadent life is hectic. When not walking my lobster, I take bike rides and contemplate la merde.
A flâneur, I parade my finery
through the arcades.
I am a fin de siècle jade like Jean Des Esseintes.
Or I am lost in drunken despair for my dead cousin, my child-bride.
She left only her little gloves behind.
Or, perhaps, loving and leaving her cold charms, I don my green wig and pink gloves and search the cafes for evil flowers in bloom to dangle from my ceiling, to kiss their living toes.
I converse with myself: "Her toes are so important. The high kicks! The pointed foot!" I admire my fun-house physique, my dapper, twisted charisma. Tête-à-tête.
The swing makes her toes easier to reach.
Between appointments, it is fine to have my toes painted, but to kiss them, I will need a sou.
For the model's life is her art.
Her art; her life.
Somehow, I feel she is getting the better end of the deal.
I am considering seeking a new sort of companion.
This one seemed terribly familiar.
Still, my passions were only a quotation.
"I was seeking a soul resembling mine, and I could not find it. I searched throughout the seven seas; my perseverance proved of no use. Yet I could not remain alone."
"Like two leeches, a pair of nervous thighs gripped tightly against the monster's viscous flesh, and arms and fins wrapped around the objects of their desire, surrounding their bodies with love, while their breasts and bellies soon fused into one bluish-green mass reeking of sea-wrack, in the midst of the tempest still raging by the light of lightning; with the foamy waves for a wedding bed, borne on an undersea current as if in a cradle, rolling and rolling down into the bottomless ocean depths, they came together in a long, chaste, and hideous mating!... At last I had found somebody who was like me!... From now on I was no longer alone in life!... Her ideas were the same as mine!... I was face to face with my first love!"
After all, who do you find the most beautiful?
The product of our union, the apple of our eye:
Judge not...
For we lived happily ever after.
Happy Birthday to you!
