Struggling! to make the necktie skirt. (It’s now pinned onto Waheeda, my new dress form — I won’t call her a dummy — my lovely headless armless legless double who makes my apartment look like what di Chirico’s would have looked like had he lived in a cluttered apartment in Brooklyn.)

It’s coming out strange, I’m having to adjust it constantly, cutting it narrower and shorter. The bias sway makes it all funny. Will it work out? I don’t know.

Thinking as I’m handling the ties about how I’m feminizing them, about all the men who wore them while they sold cars, stepped into the urinal (were the ties, I wonder for a fleeting moment, makeshift hankies?), made passes at women, sat in the bar with their friends drinking beer, argued the finer points of poetics, and all of the other things men do. Some of these ties are so outrageous that I believe their wearers must have fancied themselves real swingers. The little bits of testosterone will rub off the ties onto my legs, and now the ghosty manliness will become part of me —

I can’t decide if metaphorically neckties are nooses or if they are little outlets for men to express their colorful inner lives and latent love of fabric. Perhaps they are both.

Musing on other metaphors.

Like on the similarity of fabric (especially cotton) to human beings. That is, we can be washed although eventually we show wear. We tend to soften as we age. Like cotton, we breathe, and we need water to keep us from becoming brittle. We are fairly flexible, and fairly protective of those we are made to shelter. We are mundane.

Also trying to think of the similarity of sewing to sex. I can only come up with a couple of comparisons besides the obvious “joining” I mentioned before — how the little bits of thread scattered everywhere after working on a garment are like spent sexual fluids. And of how determinedly the needle penetrates the textiles…

Spending my time sewing instead of writing, or dancing instead of writing, is changing my relationship to what I think of as myself. I’m interested in this change.

A kind of insomnia — I told my doctor it was “attention surplus disorder” around this new hobby and also probably arising from my otherwise happily adjusted thyroid.

That depression, you see, with which I struggled for so long, is gone. Absolutely, cleanly and swiftly, gone. Huh! Interesting!