I've been drafted by the Feds as the Under-Secretary for the Arts--the Secretary's a political appointee, but I'm the background workhorse who actually disburses all those controversial grants. I'm intimidated; I just don't fit that Washingtonian crowd--a bunch of courtiers all striving to climb, and sharing a worldview I can't believe in. I mean... I see auras. I have shamanic dreams telling me the future. I'm autistic; can't look these normals in the eye, or bear their relentless smiles, backstabbing, snobbery and tribalism.

They--ever so politely, ever so sensibly, ever so forgetful when it comes to asking my permission--move all my weird, uncouth dream-comics off my work desk to a corner shelf by an open window, leaving them exposed to sun-fading and water-staining. With the best of motives, of course: they're making room for the sensible and realistic paperwork I'll now be signing--to fund art proposals that are socially uplifting, wholesome, sane--unlike mine.

I do have room on my bare office walls to make some personal statements. That's traditional, so they can't deny me. So I look through my recent art. I find three portraits, each over a meter wide or tall, in colored chalk and pastel, of creatures in my dreams--unicorn and feline people. Erotic portraits. A flirty standing pose, a rearing action sketch, a lounging odalisque. Each in a different predominant color, they'd simultaneously contrast, harmonize--and offend the Suits.

Life-size furry erotic dreams. Do I dare to hang THOSE on the wall?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Courtiers smoothly repress the real me: I just read The Pyramid Waltz by Barbara Ann Wright, set in a royal court full of climbers. Princess Katya has to play spoiled and clueless to lull a cabal of assassins, as she falls for Star, a foreigner who just came to the capital for the law library, and finds the court bizarre. Among these backstabbers, the lovers just can't safely be themselves.

• Color schemes: in Pyramid, Star's mom opens her trunk, tosses her clothes and puts in loud-colored froofy gowns. Katya's mom talks of colorschemes for a ball, distracting Katya from steps she needs to take to track down a cell of assassins...

• Chalk/pastel: my sister draws pastel landscapes professionally, but it's a medium I've rarely even tried, due to my chemical sensitivities. But I could try similar digital effects--draw on screen with a rough, textured brush, and use the equivalents of impasto, smears and scraping. (Of course, many of you may think I'm already doing a lot of that. My art, like my life, has never been squeaky-clean.)

• ACTION: take the dream literally. Draw these! Without apology for my tastes--or lack thereof. The Suits in their foundations and think-tanks mock outsiders like me as uncouth, but what have they and their good taste achieved? Respectable ruin.

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