A FEW GO UP

I chose to stay home tonight. I've been bouncing around all week and I will again next weekend. Plus, the dementors are hovering, knocking on my door. I am trying to stay quiet and rested and perhaps they will leave.

So I finished the dystopian YA book I was reading (not recommended) and began another book that is already overdue at Brewster Public Library, but hoping that I can get it finished by or on Wednesday. The book was on a couple of "should have been on notables list" lists.

"I did not want to commit suicide. Instead I felt "suicided," like a samurai who'd failed his code. But because this was America at the end of the twentieth century, no one hold held a sword out to me; the code itself was vague and undefined. I was not expected to do anything. And yet I sensed I was failing at that very American thing, "becoming an individual." Along with the promise of my father's money that I'd ultimately accepted, I also had to accept a reversal in what I'd once understood to be the normal order of American life. Rather than learning how to act for myself, as thought I were, in every moment, colonizing a new world, I learned how to absorb, to resign, to stall. No gift is entirely free. You exchange your future for another's expectation; to take the handout is to become part of a story that's never entirely yours, to dress yourself in the hand-me-downs of your ancestors. You take on the customs of your class, as my father had when he performed the thoroughly ritualized theater of my disinheritance, and as I would, too, someday. I also began to understand that this system or society—whatever one wants to call it—actually had a high tolerance for failure, indeed required it. A few go up, but most sink down and subside into irrelevance, stonelike or cowlike life. At every level, in neighborhoods, teams, jobs, schools and universities, there is a sorting, a sifting, or a threshing. The individual strides into his or her own over the bodies of the fallen, not even recognizing them as bodies, much as I'd plowed my way over the crisped, fallen leaves on the windy paths of Riverside Park.'

Finally met Chili the pug.

— Marco Roth, The Scientists

So, I have taken a nice (appropriate) dose of sleeping meds with the hopes that I will sleep the night through with Cooder and Emmylou as my fellow travellers.