I was shoveling snow when it came to me: my flinty neighbor, the one who rides his bicycle in sleet, is 007 long retired, living under the radar in Syracuse, New York.
He’s slender, craggy, silent, and probably a casino shark.
He’s my idee fixe.
Which of course gets me to wondering about all my projective imaginary obsessions. How many idee fixes can one man have?
Plenty of course. When I was a child I thought little men lived inside the radio. We had an old tube model. I pictured the people living in a city of tubes.
But childhood is too easy. What about today? What admixture of fantasy, mild paranoia, and dark amusement still occupies me?
Well, I think Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are living in my refrigerator. They’re behind a carton of dried prunes left over from a long ago, ill advised effort to bake a fruit cake. They have no friends in the fridge except for a nearly empty jar of cocktail olives. There might be three olives left in there.
The blues singer Leadbelly sang: “I’ve got grasshoppers in my pillow, I”ve got crickets all in my milk…”
I’ve got James Bond, Thatcher, and The Gipper, hanging around my domestic morning, and I hate to say it, but you do too.
Planet of the Blind 