Salad dressing

It's bronchitis. Poor goonie; no school until Friday, at best. He's sick enough for the world to be one big surrealist canvas, but not sick enough to stay out of trouble.

"The ducks like the rain because they eat grass, and the rain is like salad dressing."

"We should use these [female products] for bandages; I don't think they'd stick to the boo boo like those square ones do."

"I had a terrible dream [sobbing] that a mean man came and stole all our toys, so I had to shoot him."

***
My boss is on vacation for a week. Though I work 250 miles away from her, and though we speak about once a week--and though she is, really, a quite easy going boss, as bosses go--I woke up today feeling so unburdened and motivated. I've always known I'd do best as my own boss. Were I only courageous enough.

I've been rereading Thomas Bernhard's books--most of them literary representations of madness, especially Wittgenstein's Nephew, which I love. I was drawn to him first by the title of that book, back when I was reading Wittgenstein. (Now he's one of so many that sit on my shelf and feel like old friends except when new friends come and browse, and then I feel pretentious: we're not what we were; we become dull if we don't watch it--and I could be more vigilant on that score.)

There's a point in Wittgenstein's Nephew when the narrator's friend wants a certain newspaper, and in a manic quest for that newspaper the two of them drive through the night--across the world, in that moment. It reminds me, every time, of a summer when I drove across the country with my college roommate, and 800 miles after we'd left Tijuana we turned on our new stained glass lamps at midnight in a Motel 6 and were so enchanted by the colors that the next morning we drove back to Tijuana and bought two more. I'm unlikely to behave that way now; I'm more like my father than my mother, sadly: shortest line between two points. And the college roommate and I don't really speak anymore, though we were best friends for nearly 10 years. She would still turn around and drive back, even now. Her whimsy is rooted in a complete absence of financial constraint, I realize; her family is quite well off. Life has made me more cautious. But I don't know that I can attribute it all to that.

It makes me wonder, actually, which condition is the more mad: driving across Europe for a friend who wants a certain newspaper, or saying no.