Synopsis

I awoke feeling "wrong." For a brace of weeks I'd been full of a restless depression. I'd had these bottom-of-the-barrel feelings before, God knows, but only when things were going badly. Now, I should have been in high: I was painting well, had a few bucks--the result of seducing a dizzy school teacher into buying one of my water colors. I also had Sydney, even if I didn't quite understand my feelings about Syd. But I was so jumpy I could hardly hold a brush. At the moment it wasn't merely any blue mood --I was badly hungover. I couldn't recall having ever been so stupid-drunk as last night. Plus--the foggy idea I'd also smoked a few sticks of tea. I wasn't sure what I'd done. I wasn't positive of a damn thing except I was half-alive on a sunny Tuesday morning. I saw the ultramarine blue Mediterranean through the window, and by the height of the sun it had to be around nine a.m. On a cockeyed chair before the open window, shorts, socks, and a pink sport shirt were drying. My sloppy clothes. I've always been a slob, now I dressed that way deliberately--figured it gave me an air of manliness. I'd made a dozen attempts to paint the view from my window-- they all came out like thes...