"have you reckon'd the earth much?"

Once, many years ago when I was smitten with a fro-genius and he was smitten with me, we embarked on a journey to the Queen Mary (a journey ten minutes from our respective apartments). You see, George Noory, the Coast to Coast radio host, was visiting the ship during some haunted weekend and as fans of late night conspiracies and spooky vessels it was on.
After exploring the depths of that great old beauty, finding ghosts where whiskey made them visible, we did the Noory photo-op and prepared to head out to some innocuous and charming evening. Only not so much.

It's strange when these memories come back to me. It's all flesh and drunken dancing and the loss of individual conscience. Apparently, Noory had flown out a very young lover of his from the Midwest and just as quickly as she'd arrive, he'd had enough. I couldn't say I necessarily blamed the old dude: her naïvete was grating. With only a roller suitcase and a handful of crocodile tears, she stood in the deserted parking lot beside the ship and attempted to hail a cab. And how could we leave her there? All pink velour tracksuit, coming down from her Hawaiian Tropic pageant high and without a penny to her name (Noory had her wallet).
We took the gal back to my studio where dude made grilled cheese sandwiches while she got comfortable (which is to say topless). Tan as the day is long and with fake breasts so static you felt time was freezing, she tried on all my costume jewelry and paraded across the hardwood. At the time and even now, it didn't strike me as bizarre. It struck me as a moment shaped by a very specific modern savagery. I mean, there dude was in the kitchen cooking for us, swilling off some now-forgotten bottle while we banged on phantom drums and perfected our figure eights. Now he and I didn't fancy ourselves the type of people who invited plastic fantastics into our living quarters but that was what was just so spectacular about the evening; there was some sort of lovely equalizing that took shape (a process which I suppose cheese and alcohol had informed).
After the sandwiches, we all cuddled up on my murphy bed and passed out like three magnetic 's's.
**********************************************************************************
An excellent documentary on Henrietta Lacks (HeLa), the women whose cells traversed the planet and momentarily confounded molecular biologists. I can't wait to read the book on her that just came out.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-way-of-all-flesh/
**********************************************************************************
Been hanging out with Whitman's "Song of Myself" and what a fucking joy:

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and
vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of
the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the
earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?