Saturday, April 30, 2016

DISSOLVING SCRAPS






"When daylight lasts until 10 P.M because of the time change, and the traffic noise has died down, I have the illusion that all I'd need to do is return to those faraway neighborhoods to find the people I've lost, who had never left ... It's like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that's left are scraps that dissolve before you can put them together.

— Patrick Modiano, Chien de Printemps

I certainly wish it were quiet here, well, after 10 P.M. As usual, we are heading to the 1 A.M. zone. I had thought that maybe I would get to bed earlier, as I, comme d'habitude, did not sleep well. It was after 11 A.M. when I finally got out of bed. Can anyone tell me how long a dog can bark without stopping? There is at least one canine in my neighborhood that is going for the record.

Speaking of dream scraps, I had a heart-filling dream this morning. I was in New York, walking around some neighborhood with Kim and Ginny. I was so incredibly happy in the dream. I was so excited to be back home. Then I woke up with a touch of the bittersweet: the happiness left a little buzz of pleasure, but the reality is the ass end of Los Angeles.

The weather was good today, though. Sometimes the weather is so temperate and beautiful, you can imagine why people thought it was a good place to move to.

As for productivity, well, not so very much. I had a pair of special sunglasses for my mother that needed to be returned. Obstacles, of course, presented the roadblocks for that to be a simple path: lost the soft case for awhile, couldn't remember where we had ordered them, then some email exchange (I am still not sure they will take them). Once the arrangements were made there's the big obstacle of not having a printer. Sigh.

Well, today I was determined to focus on that one task (see recent posts) and get that damn box in the mail. Yes, there were more steps involved like having to drive twice (3 miles each way, so that makes 12 miles) to get the printed copies, and oooh, no packing tape ... blah blah blah. But! 'Tis done. And I even managed to post a birthday present before the due date (along with three post-birthday missals).

So, in Pepsyian form, to bed. I have just enough energy for some reading,having snagged some delectable new books from the library: The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire,  Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, Peter Arno: The Mad, Mad World of the New Yorker's Greatest Cartoonist, Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock.





1 comment:

  1. A dog can bark for days without stopping, I believe. It would hurt our throats to yell that long, but it is different for them. The dog has probably gone into psychosis mode involving dominance or aggression or one of those things. As for the weather here, it is desert weather more or less, but without the appeal of being in the desert where there are sagebrush and so forth. It is an environment that was never of great appeal, it was just sold that way to people back east who had snow and rain. It was all about real estate development. For some of us this weather is hell on earth.

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