AND AWAY IT GOES ...

Feelin' a little "slippin' into darkness..." but not in a wholly down kind of way. And what does that even mean? I am shifting into lower gear? An even quieter place?

Today passed in a sort of a daze. After calling 311 again about loud men on the sidewalk, I finally fell asleep. The iPod alarm that I could not entirely remember how to set started going off around 7:00 and I repeatedly hit the sleep button. I did get up in time to make it to therapy on time.

I finally caught up with my homegirl, Pammie, in KC. We were on the telephone for about 2.5 - 3 hours. It had been a long time since we had spoken. We could have talked more but we are both slightly telephone averse.

Then I passed out for many hours. Like five. Maybe it is some psychic realignment or something. I hope I can sleep like that through the night. I need to get my organization mojo back and clean up the serious mess I made last week. After all, the Divine Ms. M(artha) is supposed to descend from the mount of Brewster on Monday!

Still working my way through All Things Shining, although generally dismayed by my having fallen off the reading wagon. (Hmm ... at least dragging my feet or holding on by my fingers to the alcohol wagon as i have had small amounts of alcohol most days this week.)

"... [DF] Wallace wants to unpack the world as it really is. 'I've always though of myself as a realist,' he said in the Salon interview.

The world I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options ... I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different that what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river a 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.

And although this quote is a bit out of context, those dear and faithful readers ought (without unreal expectations here) to be able to jump to the overall context of distraction and "mod'ren" life...

'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath born me on his back a thousand times.'

In Shakespeare's rendering Yorick, the fellow of infinte jest, is drawn in contrast with the melancholy Dane. Wallace's contemporary treatment offers us a whole culture taken over by Hamlet's heavy disposition. The flight to distraction, however, ends no longer in the arms of a man of most excellent fancy, a court jester who bears you on his back and lifts your spirits. Instead, the power of infinite jest is sedating; it leaves you congealed, in your special recliner, having wet your pants. Entertainment of this perfect sort takes away our humanity instead of restoring it to us.

That's what gets to me. How much of MY humanity is diminished or assaulted by pornography, relentless and repetitive Judd Apatow celebration of puerililty of male flicks ... and possibly by "chick flicks" ... but the "antics" of Anthony Weiner and Charlie Sheen ... All in all, very depressing.

The battle can be tiring and does not seem like it is winnable at all.