The word fluvial appeals to me today. Of or pertaining to a river. I can’t see that it has particular relevance to my life, unless I want to awkwardly wade into the poetic, philosophical. If I were a better person, which we have fairly definitively established that I am not …having written that clause I cannot remember the “then” part of that thought. And so it goes ...
Waking up to heat and new flea bites. Ah, wall-to-wall carpeting. After I get Janet to the senior center, perhaps I will find the diatomaceous earth and spread it around.
It's kind of funny that Try A Little Tenderness is one of my favorite songs, as I am severely challenged to do that with my mother. Why aren't there any good rock and roll songs or former Broadway ballads to rhapsodize about the universal experience of dealing with aging parents and really the living loss of a loved one?
In another aside — although can rambling legitimately have asides? — I have terrible lower back pain today. With all the yoga I have been doing and my general back flexibility, this seems unlikely. Oh well, swimming starts in an hour and perhaps that will help. (July 12.)
Several days later.
Back still hurts, however, I am going to try a yoga class subtitled, Healthy Back. I think I twisted and stretched at the same time a bit too often last week. This may well be my last class of the week.
We cannot paint a beloved face without passionately distorting it—and who speaks willingly of the things that belong to real love? But we can catch and hold—with words or with the brush—the crimson flush of dying leaves, the green of a meteor against the blue night, a movement of dawn, a catastrophe. Pictures which of themselves have no sense or depth, but which we invest with meaning or sharp foreboding—they bear for ever the stamp of a particular year, mark the end of a run of bad luck, or the culmination of a spell of prosperity. For that reason no one of us can ever swear tat he has painted, contemplated, described in vain.
— Colette, My Apprenticeship,1936
Now July 30.
I'm Only Sleeping popped up on my shuffle the other day and it is in a pretty constant loop in my head. And that's an okay thing
I just can't with the news this morning.Generally, I make a cup of coffee and sit back down on the bed to peruse the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Lit Hub Daily. I do the easy crossword puzzle in the NYT.
Not so today. Every article in the NYT seems to be about something horrible. Hey Brock Turner wasn't actually trying to penetrate that unconscious woman, he was just trying to use her unconscious body to get off. I mean, are unwanted fingers in a vagina penetration? Evidently not. Poor guy. Six whole months in jail for sexual assault. What have we come to?
Well, that is a question we ask ourselves on an almost constant basis. For many of us, it is a mantra, in that it stops, and in this case, dulls our minds while zapping our spirits to almost nothing.
When I realized that I was a failure and that I had to give up my dream/reality of living independently, leave my Park Slope apartment, and that I was pretty much done, I tried to climb under my bed (which was very close to the floor) and hide, float in a small space. (I have likely mentioned this before.)
I feel like that almost every day now.
I have so neglected the garden that it is now quite a task to get it somewhere near control. I might not even both had I not picked up some bargain plants that I want to get in the dirt before the simply dehydrate in this heat. My backyard tomato plants need fertilizing badly. I am going to post this, just to feel a bit of productivity, take my second cup of java outside, and see if I can make a dent in the greenery before it is too hot to live.
I MARVELLED AT HOW GENERALLY I WAS AIDED
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
I marvel at how generally
I am aided, how frequently
the availability of helpis demonstrated. I've had
unbridgeable distances collapse
and opposite objects coalesce
enough to think that duress itself
may be a prayer. Perhaps not chance,
but need, selects; and desperation
works upon giraffes until their necks
can reach the necessary branch.
If so, help alters; makes seven vertebrae
go farther in the living generation;
help coming to us, not from the fathers,
not to the children.
— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010
In another aside — although can rambling legitimately have asides? — I have terrible lower back pain today. With all the yoga I have been doing and my general back flexibility, this seems unlikely. Oh well, swimming starts in an hour and perhaps that will help. (July 12.)
Several days later.
Back still hurts, however, I am going to try a yoga class subtitled, Healthy Back. I think I twisted and stretched at the same time a bit too often last week. This may well be my last class of the week.
We cannot paint a beloved face without passionately distorting it—and who speaks willingly of the things that belong to real love? But we can catch and hold—with words or with the brush—the crimson flush of dying leaves, the green of a meteor against the blue night, a movement of dawn, a catastrophe. Pictures which of themselves have no sense or depth, but which we invest with meaning or sharp foreboding—they bear for ever the stamp of a particular year, mark the end of a run of bad luck, or the culmination of a spell of prosperity. For that reason no one of us can ever swear tat he has painted, contemplated, described in vain.
— Colette, My Apprenticeship,1936
Now July 30.
I'm Only Sleeping popped up on my shuffle the other day and it is in a pretty constant loop in my head. And that's an okay thing
I just can't with the news this morning.Generally, I make a cup of coffee and sit back down on the bed to peruse the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Lit Hub Daily. I do the easy crossword puzzle in the NYT.
Not so today. Every article in the NYT seems to be about something horrible. Hey Brock Turner wasn't actually trying to penetrate that unconscious woman, he was just trying to use her unconscious body to get off. I mean, are unwanted fingers in a vagina penetration? Evidently not. Poor guy. Six whole months in jail for sexual assault. What have we come to?
Well, that is a question we ask ourselves on an almost constant basis. For many of us, it is a mantra, in that it stops, and in this case, dulls our minds while zapping our spirits to almost nothing.
When I realized that I was a failure and that I had to give up my dream/reality of living independently, leave my Park Slope apartment, and that I was pretty much done, I tried to climb under my bed (which was very close to the floor) and hide, float in a small space. (I have likely mentioned this before.)
I feel like that almost every day now.
I have so neglected the garden that it is now quite a task to get it somewhere near control. I might not even both had I not picked up some bargain plants that I want to get in the dirt before the simply dehydrate in this heat. My backyard tomato plants need fertilizing badly. I am going to post this, just to feel a bit of productivity, take my second cup of java outside, and see if I can make a dent in the greenery before it is too hot to live.
I MARVELLED AT HOW GENERALLY I WAS AIDED
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
I marvel at how generally
I am aided, how frequently
the availability of helpis demonstrated. I've had
unbridgeable distances collapse
and opposite objects coalesce
enough to think that duress itself
may be a prayer. Perhaps not chance,
but need, selects; and desperation
works upon giraffes until their necks
can reach the necessary branch.
If so, help alters; makes seven vertebrae
go farther in the living generation;
help coming to us, not from the fathers,
not to the children.
— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010
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