I found you in the Chatsubo too, just like Marcus (hi, Marcus!).
You were standing around kind of to one side wearing the most beautiful hat made of obsolete fiberoptic threads, ancient coils of phone line hanging pendant in back like the curls of some frontier lady; our dear departed frontier (ice and silence on a net with no horizon, no frontier. Or all frontier. Depends on what you're drinkin').
It looks as though you're drinking absinthe (the green fairy), which is a good thing, I'll buy you another.
Your drink comes courtesy of An Artist, sure.
She's nominally a student of Comparative Literatures but (these things happen) she's actually living out the life of some Girl Poet just as hard as she can.
There's a little alabaster statuette of Great Diana with a round face and fierce ruby eyes. Sinister and a little insane. Our Artist has a little of this look. Too many dreams of being a fish back in mother's womb.
The Artist makes things, sure.
Drew a picture of a desiring machine on the title page of her Rousseau seminar paper.
Writes things. Roars at her guitar. Sometimes the things get out, most of the time they stay in the country of their birth: if you take the steps in Irvine to the lovely graduate student apartments where they keep the lovely graduate students in identical beige-curtained boxes, if you open the bedroom door and CREEP inside, if you fend off the strange things on the walls and go to the beautiful computer that she paid for using the imaginary force of a student loan, if you turn the computer on, WELL! You ascend another, secret staircase (creaking steps of rotting wood) that takes you to another, secret apartment: the one-room bedsit in Ardbarra House in The Republic of Ireland Home of RipRoaring Medb the Greenheaded Warrior Queen of Fucking Connacht. You just turn the long-barreled key, it's easy; once you're in there all the little files sit up and beg.
The Artist's Beret lives here too. It's a purple velvet hat she bought for twenty quid back in 1989 before the Berlin Wall came down. She was standing in the little courtyard looking into the supermarket (why the fuck when you got Hurley's Market five feet down Magazine Road from your windy nest? Well, this was early on, I didn't know how to live on beans and toast quite yet). Across from the supermarket as it started to rain was a little shop full of strips of cloth and polished pieces of wood. The other Americans thought the Artist was, shall we say, ATHWART THE LINE; so she shelled out and bought up, purple velvet, a hat shaped like the hat of Maud Gonne, adultress and Irish revolutionary, who gave Yeats exactly what he deserved.
This Beret now exists only in the sodden one-room flat inside the Artist's Macintosh, the casualty of a hasty departure.
The Artist is delighted to funnel absinthe into your waiting glass. She has goggles around her neck now, her raincoat is industrial strength, yeah, it's lined with metal pipe and cunningly worked embroidery of silicon chips decorates the sleeve upon which she keeps her virtual heart. She keeps up with the times. Her boots used to let the rain in; they're sealed good and tight now. Alcohol and music kept her warm; now she learns her weapons stealthy and with infinite care.
Have another glass.