After an excruciating week, there's still nothing much to report about Sam except that he's probably got an exotic mycobacterial infection of some unknown kind. Further tests are required. Since stress is tiring and distraction takes effort and diligence, I've decided to relax about Sam's condition and adopt a cheerful nonchalance about the whole affair, a kind of affable fatalism honed by many years of wandering in the forbidding wilderness of homosexual romance. Sam? Why Sam's fine, in the pink of health. Just look at him, see him winking at us from his voluptuously upholstered divan? And would a cat facing a dangerous health situation speak so casually of his plans for the summer? I told him cruises are for dullards but he keeps looking at that stack of brochures.

Yesterday afternoon I fell asleep while reading and when I woke up it was dark and I had a moment or two of not remembering who I was. These identity crises or amnesiac flashes (I call them "palate cleansers") can be so refreshing, too bad they only last a couple of seconds. Still, I don't like to wake up in a darkened room like that, or wake up to any altered conditions for that matter. Surrounding objects seem to take on certain menacing qualities, suspicious qualities, like they've been up to something or they've been slacking off a little and are caught off guard by my sudden awakening. People erroneously trust their perceptions in all sorts of situations, according to the emotional timbre of the moment. If I lift a wooden desk chair over my head with the intent of bringing it down with walloping force on the skull of a loved one, I am pretty much banking on the solidity of that chair. When I wake up and the room has gotten dark and I hazily make out the very same chair it doesn't seem solid at all, in fact it seems rather materially indistinct. Every object should make an effort to sharpen its tangibility at such times. After all what purpose do objects serve that's more important than to provide reassuring frames of reference for perceiving organisms? They can do whatever they want when I'm sleeping or in the other room but they better be ready when it counts. That barely perceptible machine-like humming I sometimes hear must in fact be a sort of signal or tocsin that objects employ to alert one another to my approach. If I turn suddenly and catch them winking out I will wag my finger and say don't get sloppy you motherfuckers.