I'd page through the Wall Street Journal to see what the enemy was thinking and would marvel at the mendacious, calculated stupidity of their editorial page.
I'd make friends with two big gentle labrador retrievers and tell them that "this is what you do when you are a people." I'd feed them first. Before anything else. Just like John Wayne did in that movie, that I never actually saw, but that my father told me about sometimes, when we talked about movies and John Wayne.
I'd take a steam bath in their marble monstrosity of a bathroom. I'd turn the steam full on, and see how long I could stand it. I'd think that the steam was healing me; that the heat was making me sweat out the tiredness and pain and hell yeah, even leaching out the sins of my life. I'd actually think "sins," but it would bring a smile to my face and I'd tell myself I was just being "ironic."
I'd pretend the mansion was mine, and I'd invent reasons for why I'd own and be living in a mansion. They'd be silly and far-fetched reasons, still they'd be reasons that would make me forget the cold reality of my precarious existence floating like a little bubble in the firmament.
