BY THE SHALLOW PART

(High school field.)

Thunder and lightning! It’s thunder and lighting in Los Angeles! And for it to rain on the Oscar night! But it is so lovely to hear the rain here. 

I had an unusual number of folks I know nominated. And two of them won. But I still didn’t watch much of the awards. Mère and I flipped around, and, of course, we had to fulfill our addiction and watch the largely useless Downton Abbey. 

The next day.

I never got dressed on Sunday. Still not dressed now. It being the grey sort of stay-in day must have inspired me to hibernate a bit. There was laundry to do, more party clean up, some reading and such, but just truly doing very little was more seductive than I could resist.

Maybe it was my 2.5 hour nap yesterday, but I could.not.sleep. Finally, around 4:00 I just bit the bullet and took some sleeping medication. I was so sleepy at 11:00 or so, but the reality dementors kept trying to come through the windows of my sleep so I couldn't relax enough. Usually, the British History Podcast or the current George R. R. Martin, Dances with Dragons, would snooze me out, but neither of these were loaded on my phone. 

Well, so much for any attempt to concentrate and write today. It's pretty unconscionable that I would yell at my 88-year old mother, and yet it happens. I definitely have my flash points with her and helplessness probably tops the list. That's part of my own internal battle of being capable and incapable. I do know that I can kick ass, but there are ways, deep patterns of helplessness and passivity that have held me back in my life. The tendency to depression compounds it all. Maybe I will yet find a way to overcome these issues.

Much later and starting on a fresh one. But a Greil Marcus quote before I go ... still working on The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

"Or it's a walk away from a career already suspended over a void of nothingness, it's almost any cut on an album that's meant to pretend it's just a song, not a worthless, desperate bet against ruin ..."

I managed to find a poetry anthology in the library for those times I am just so lost and need to refocus. This William Stafford poem is good for the first Monday after the beginning of the acursèd Daylight Savings Time.

MONDAY

Awake, like a hippopotamus with eyes bulged
from the covers, I find Monday, improbable
as chair legs, camped around me, and God's terrible
searchlight raking down from his pillbox on Mount Hood, 
while His mystic hammers reach from the alarm clock
and rain spangles on my head.

Cliff at my back all week I live, afraid
when light comes, because it has deep whirlpools
in it. I cross each day by the shallow part but
have often touch the great hole in the sky
at noon. I close my eyes and let the day
for a while wander where all things will, and then
it settles in a fold of the north.

At the end, in my last sickness, I think I will travel
north, if well-meaning friends will let me—to bush,
to rock, to snow—have nothing by me, fall
on the sky of earth in the north, and let my heart
finally understand that part of the world
I have secretly loved all my life—the rock. But now
I gradually become young, surge from the covers,
and go to work.