WALKING AND ESCAPING

3:15 p.m. - Again, I woke up before my alarm, although not quite as early. I was having a complicated dream about a wedding and a Grateful Dead concert with lots of people from various areas of my past intersecting. I know I got out of bed, made coffee, and feasted, over some time, on last night's left-over pizza. Business was discussed over Skype. (This just in: watched some The Good Wife ... that's where the blank happened.)

And then the dread started. The anxiety. I am trying to track down this anxiety. Part of it is the child-mind screaming "I don't want to!" and "I can't!!" in relation to really cleaning my desk. I know I harp on this and whine, but I have a crazy aversion to it. There decisions involved in throwing and putting things away. WTF?

But I am returning to it.

4:04 p.m. I pushed through some more piles, but I do have a big mess on my hands. I have an urge to climb into bed and read until I get sleepy. But I am going to walk to the post office (my shoes are on) to see if it changes my energy.

I try to motivate myself by telling me that I am doing this FOR ME. So, that I have less visual distraction, more space to write and create, and work, and one less thing to think about. So far, this has not been a big motivator for me.

6:40 I walked to the post office. I walked to Barnes and Noble to buy cards ... there are not any good card shops nearby and the Papyrus (although who knows who owns that chain now ... probably B&N) is not convenient. I perused magazines. I perused books. I walked in the Valley of Temptation, working overtime to justify the purchase of a book or magazine treat. But I was able to quell the lust for acquisition which I imagine might allay my desk-cleaning anxiety.

9:00 So, the report from the street is that there are still hither-and-yon patches of snow in some brownstone front areas, but people are starting to throw away cool stuff again and we can park more comfortably.

I managed to stay out of bed, although I haven't been terribly productive but, you know, I did some thangs.

And to encourage myself to finish the third of those long-held library books, I will share a couple of choice mots from one of those books I found while ransacking the new books shelves, A Thousand Peaceful Cities by Jerzy Pilch, It isn't long, it isn't difficult, and it is actually rather funny, but I have struggled to get it read.

"It was never like that again. White planets began to glide along the darkening horizon, stars were falling just behind our backs."


"I don't intend either to speed it up or slow it down. I intend to lend it a definitive character. Or rather to make society aware of the inevitability of history."


"Elzunia giggled, but almost immediately her slightly asymmetrical features, one that foretold incredible beauty, went into disarray. At that time, I didn't know yet that speaking with a woman with a woman with whom you are not in love about a woman with whom you are in love is a deadly transgression, but I remembered the expression on Elzunia Baptystka's face forever. It was not an expression of despair or pain, or even of distaste. It was an expression of slowly mastered vulnerability. It was the look of the helpless woman who is trying to come to terms with male thoughtlessness, since there is nothing else to be done. ..."