Notepad - The Version of Menace

Antonio was sad, without knowing why. It was registered to him as depth. But it was his lady who saved him from the wiles of the Merchant of Venice, who was never sad, only mad. And so the lady Portia, played by a boy - as were all women on the English stage until the Restoration - dressed and passed as a young man. Gender was very confusing to the Elizabethan, as witness the Bard's mash notes to his young Lord, who evidently fancied him, to the extent the Sonneteer sought to excuse himself in deference to his lack of use for any extra appendage.

And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

I don't think English Lit profs spend much time with Sonnet 20.

I have never been clinically depressed, which suggests my simplicity, nor at all concerned by that lascivious, which argues my simple-mindedness. I don't even worry that the keyboard selector plucks more interesting terms out of the dictionary than I can. Lascivious? What was it thinking?

It was Thanksgiving and me and my brother Reloj were living as poors in El Paso. We had only stray items in the apartment of the ski bum who was having the usual feast with his lady and her family. I placed my hand on a cabinet and rested my forehead there. Just for a moment, just resting.

And Reloj asked what the master was. He was concerned. We were in hard times, but our very culture and literature was based on the Bohemian, the Beats. Yet even Jesus worried be had no place to lay his head, though even foxes have their dens. And here Reloj had lived out Down and Out in Paris and London by accepting a job as a dishwasher in a dive in Denison one literary evening.

I was in front of the small TV in the bedroom later, and Reloj enters grinning, holding two festive plates of whatsoever he could find in the kitchen; peas, squash, lettuce, but decorated so joyously it made me very glad. At least we would be fed. It would ask be better tomorrow. I was sure of it.

It was. Never since then have I placed a palm on a cabinet and settled my fevered brow upon it. I just have no knack for sad. It's just the superficial in my soul.
... From my KINDLE HDX