Tingle and Sweat

A honeybee or yellow jacket flew into my office a few minutes ago. Since I'm terribly afraid of stinging insects, I'm doing my best to pretend that it's not a threat. Yet even though I'm staring intently at the monitor and listening hard to Richard Hell, my whole body is pricked with anxiety. Maybe that's not the music to be listening to right now, considering that I also have a fear of needles -- my beloved mentor Julian Boyd used to say that I was clearly afraid of slow penetration, since a sting takes longer than a stick -- but I have to talk to Hell on the phone this evening and need to fill my head with as much of his art and life as I can in order to be able to improvise during our conversation. OK, I'm going to be brave and scan the room for that infernal creature. It's circling inside the upside-down plastic lampshade of my IKEA-purchased source of incandescent light. And I can see its silhouette, which relaxes me just enough to lean back in my chair for the first time since I started writing this. But my neck is still in knots and I have damp droplets on my forehead.