P IS FOR WHERE ALL BAD AMERICANS GO WHEN THEY DIE

"Freud's attitude always seemed to say: 'If they don't understand me, they must be stamped into Hell.'"
 - Carl Jung of Freud

{Freud's famous sofa which was a gift from a patient, 

a Madame Benvenisti. 

She told Freud that if she was going to have her head examined, 

she might as well be comfortable, 

 so she bought him a plain beige, divan-style sofa—

what some people might call a “swooning couch”—

which Freud covered in exotic red Persian carpets 

and piled up with velvet pillows.}

Freud answered my question of what the next letter was to be in my Free Association exercise, "P."

"Paris," I said quickly to keep Mark Twain from being himself and driving Freud to ghost-icide.

"Why Paris?" asked Freud.

"It is one of the destinations in my new Steampunk novel, The Not-So-Innocents Abroad:
 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1530302722/

He nodded.  "So this city is much in your thoughts, is it?"

Freud actually smiled,

" The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—

that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality."

"Oh, yes, Paris," moaned Mark.

"Anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the damnable. 

More than a hundred years ago somebody asked Lucanus, 'Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?'

 'Yes,' said he, 'Last summer in Paris.' 

Let us change the proverb; 

Let us say all bad Americans go to Paris when they die. 

 No, let us not say it for this adds a new horror to Immortality."

Freud looked dourly at the ghost of Mark Twain.

"If I promise to miss you, would you go away?"

"Naw, you'd enjoy it too much."