Today Is Not Over Yet

Lost Generation Meeting in Manhattan

We’re meeting after midnight.  It’s always after midnight.  I don’t know why it has to be like that, but it is that way.  We don’t know why.  No one really knows why.  It doesn’t matter.  It really doesn’t matter that we don’t know why.  We’re meeting after midnight.  That’s just how it is.  And even if that’s not how it is, it’ll still have to do.  Because then the way that it’s not will become that’s how it is, and how it is is always how it has to be.  We’ll be meeting, and we’ll be talking about the things we need to talk about and that will be that.  

We might be meeting somewhere elegant.  Somewhere where the people are elegant and the things are elegant.  Maybe it will be Manhattan, in a business hotel.  Those are the kinds of places where we can do the kind of talking we want to talk about.  There, people can talk about Ernest Hemingway like they want to talk about him.  No one will have to talk in a quiet voice.  The voices people use when they are embarrassed, we won’t have to talk like that.  Because there’s nothing embarrassing about this. Not this, not at all.

Then again, if we are embarrassed, we can move.  We can move from the inside of the hotel to the outside.  We could go from the room to the places outside the room.  The hallway, or the terrace.  It would be nice if our room had a terrace, because then we would have options.  Some of the best times happen on the terrace.  You can look it up.  I wouldn’t make that up.  That’s the kind of thing Hemingway used to get angry about, when people made things up.  But we won’t make them up.  What we say will be real, and it will be true, and even if it’s not true, it will have to do.  Because that’s exactly how it will be.