A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about fantasy. As I sit here this morning, drinking my rapidly-cooling coffee, the topic remains on my mind, if in a slightly different context. I think, perhaps, I should have pursued a career in psychology, given my attraction to the mysteries of the human mind. But such an assessment inevitably leads to regrets. I do not need any more of those at this moment. So I’ll try to avoid thinking of myself in terms of “what might have been.” That frame of mind is too bleak. I’ll try to think, instead, that my vivid fantasy life is an indicator of my brain’s youthful flexibility and still-active potential.

But let’s be realistic. Some fantasies are impossible. For example, my fantasy about being a middle-aged Scandinavian. No matter how badly I want to be a 43-year-old Dane or a 51-year-old Norwegian, it’s not going to happen. It’s simply impossible. So why even entertain such unattainable fantasies? Why bother dreaming of attaining the unreachable? I suppose it’s a means of escape from life that sometimes feels like it’s taking place inside a cage with hardened steel bars sealed behind platinum locks. Escapism, pure and simple. Maybe that’s what I need from time to time. Or always.

But some fantasies are not outlandish and impossible. Recently, I read an article that suggested realistic fantasies sometimes serve as motivational triggers and actionable propellants. They establish goals with clearly definable interim checkpoints. People who indulge fantasies as cues or realistic aspirations worthy of expending efforts to achieve them have a much better chance of reaching those goals than do people who simply daydream about them. That is, people whose fantasies spur them to incremental actions tend to reach those goals, whereas people who fail to use the fantasies as motivators tend not to. The theory sounds reasonable. I don’t recall, though, whether it was based on research or simply on “common sense.”

My writing tends to incorporate, whether explicitly or through tangential reference, my fantasies. As my sixty-seventh birthday looms just over a month and a half away, I wonder whether old men (and women) who dream of different variations of their futures (that is, people who indulge in fantasy) are deluding themselves.  Achievement of fantasies one embraces in youth and middle age, I would think, tends to have a better chance of occurring than the wishes and dreams that emerge later in life. No matter how youthful I think my brain might be, the body surrounding it is in an accelerating state of decay; that’s true for most of us after we reach our youthful prime.

Somewhere along the line, though, I’m sure I’ve heard and/or read an adage that says something to the effect that “you’re never too old to dream.” I suppose that’s true, though at some point dreaming or fantasies become magical thinking, completely untethered to reality. Would it be good to know precisely when that severance takes place? Or would that knowledge have an ugly impact on one’s sense of well-being…one’s sense of purpose?

I’m afraid many, if not most, people in my sphere would think fantasies/dreams/wishes/ aspirations/etc. at my stage of life are wastes of mental energy—exercises in futility that serve no useful purpose. “Responsible adults do not engage in nonsensical fantasy,” I imagine hearing some of them say. “Who says I’m a responsible adult?” I might reply. My response would vary, depending on context: my mood, the state of affairs in my immediate realm, etc., etc., etc. Whether attainable or not, though, fantasies can provide relief from the burdens of day-to-day life. Escape. Temporary freedom from the realities of a planet whose occupants, more often than not, appear to have gone mad and intent on suicide or, if I might coin a term, humanicide. [As an aside, sometimes I think neologisms emerge from need. With a hat tip to Woody Allen, I am not entirely opposed to humanicide, but I do not think I want to be present when it takes place.]

Seriously, I frequently wonder about fantasy and whether my active fantasy life is evidence of my insanity or simply an outgrowth of writing fiction. I might turn that around, though, and say my fiction is simply a symptom of my insanity. Writing about the questions, I suppose, is as much escapism as is the creation in my mind of communities of like-minded people who love one another, live to serve, and treat the natural world with the respect and dignity it deserves. I’ll have to write more about those communities; my ideas about urban and rural pockets that represent the “salvation” of humanity.

The thunder and lightning outside suggest I should turn off and unplug my computer, lest it be fried like the recent experience with my phone system, television, and DVD player!

I may risk electrocution later this morning. I’ve had a ceiling fan speed control switch sitting on my desk for months, its installation waiting for my rage to subside from the last time I installed one just like it for another fan. When I installed the last one, a project that should have taken 15 minutes, I took about two hours, thanks to the fact that the junction box into which the body of the control had to fit was filled with inflexible wires. In spite of the many obstacles to its installation, I got the last one in. But I had help; I was able to rely on my wife to tell me whether the power was off when I flipped breakers in the garage. This time, I have no one to assist. It will just take longer to ensure that I’ve cut the power. But the longer it takes, the less patient I become. The last installation, for example, was completed two hours in, but only after I managed to put the switch in upside down. Yet it works. It remains upside down. Perhaps I should correct that mistake before making another one.

Whatever. I may not work on either of them today. Perhaps, instead, I’ll spend my morning making and consuming a Bloody Mary or six, thus deadening my rage t fan speed control switches. Not likely; I think I need to conserve celery to make tuna salad. A Bloody Mary is not a Bloody Mary in the absence of a celery stalk poking out of the glass. And drinking alone, in the morning, is a bad sign. “A bad sign.” If I recall correctly, “Born Under a Bad Sign” was a track off an album called Strange Brew by Cream/Eric Clapton. After a pause to explore whether my memory was working, I’m back to report that I was right about the tune, but it was written by Booker T. Jones and was also recorded by blues artist Albert King. I don’t know who recorded it first.

I just noticed I switched from ceiling fan speed control to early morning alcohol consumption to celery to competing tracks of what has become a blues classic. And it’s not even 7:00 a.m. yet.

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My interest in the companionship of a dog has surfaced again, as it does from time to time. Except I recognize it, now, as a temporary state of mental exhaustion that will subside when I realize the extent of the obligation and the costs of veterinary care, food, and such. Maybe fostering a little homeless beast for a period would be appropriate? Probably not; my wife, when she returns home, would find evidence that I gave in to my yearning for a pet. Best to let the pet-ache pass.

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As I gaze out the window, I see evidence that I might drown if I went outdoors and took a deep breath. The fog is not as thick as it sometimes is, but for some reason it seems more dangerous, as if could replace the oxygen in my lungs with water in a single breath. I think it’s the fact that the fog embraces leaves on trees so tightly that the leaves cannot move. The wet air is holding them captive, motionless, waiting for the leaves to succumb to humid suffocation before dripping away from them, leaving them limp and lifeless.

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What am I thinking? This is the weekend! I am therefore under no obligation to do anything other than enjoy my free time. I need not replace fan switches, wash windows, organize household paperwork, shower, shave, or otherwise engage in productive tasks. That does not mean I will not do those things; only that I am absolved of responsibility for them until after 11:59 p.m. Sunday evening.  That takes a modest load off my shoulders. Not enough to eliminate my desire for a thorough neck massage; desire is a wish with no expectation of attainment.

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Regardless of obligations, I’ve decided to do something other than write. My fingers need a rest and my expanding belly is screaming to be fed. So I shall feed it. Because I am nothing if not a benevolent servant of my gustatory wishes. Ego sub nullius officium agere. If Google Translate is correct, those words are Latin for “I am under no obligation to act.”

Bloody raccoons! I woke much later than usual this morning, around 6, and wandered out of the bedroom without even putting on my “morning clothes.” As I exited the bedroom into the living area, and before even reaching for the light switch, I noticed movement outside on the deck.  My eyes adjusted quickly to the very dim light outside. A large raccoon slithered across the deck (slithered is the only way to describe that furtive, undulating movement). Another smaller one scurried along the deck railing near the hummingbird feeder that I left out for the night, thanks to the lingering rain and my disinterest in tracking water into the house as I retrieved it. A third one on the railing scampered in another direction. As soon as I saw the beasts, I stomped my feet and growled. Their movement ceased. I rushed to open the back door and screamed a few obscenities at the animals. Though they retreated, their departure was unhurried, as if the screams of an angry fat man wearing only underwear and flip-flops were not particularly frightening. Fortunately, the feeder remained, dangling from the hook I once hoped would keep it out of reach of raccoons thirsty for sugar-based nectar. I’ve long since abandoned that hope, replacing it with resigned acceptance that I would need to take the feeders in every night during hummingbird season. Except when weather and sloth conspire to bring out the lethargy in me.

That experience was more than an hour ago. Since then, I’ve donned my morning clothes, made coffee, eaten a ginger snap (dipped in said coffee) and read more than I care to know about the Republican National Convention. I also absorbed information that a polar bear attacked a camp site in Norway’s Svalbard Islands on Friday, killing a foreign national before the bear was killed. The man was taken to a hospital in Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Norway’s Arctic Svalbard archipelago, which is more than 500 miles north of the Norwegian mainland. It was too late; he died.

In terms of raw drama and tragic run-ins with Mother Nature, raccoon invasions and distant hurricanes and the fierce remnants of local tropical storms do not compare to polar bear attacks. Except for the pain I imagine would accompany a polar bear attack leading to one’s death, I think that way of departing this life might have some appeal, if for no other reason than to imprint the memory of one’s mode of death on the minds of survivors. I started to say “on the minds of descendants,” but one without children has no descendants. Oh, well. It’s not a matter that merits much thought, inasmuch as the likelihood I will die at the claws of a polar bear is less than minuscule.

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My mood of late has grown increasingly somber, despite multiple inquiries from people who want to boost my morale or provide a sympathetic ear, etc. I am afraid to engage more than superficially because I know, if I were to open up, I would melt into a puddle, an  undeserved pity sponge. It would be especially embarrassing and frustrating, knowing that I am not the one deserving sympathy and support; my wife, stuck in hospitals or rehab facilities for going on six weeks, is the one who needs it much, much more. She is in a place now where she cannot even have visitors, save the occasional visit by her sister and me through a glass window, speaking over a two-way intercom. I am angry at myself that I allow my self-pity to put me at risk of a tearful meltdown. Yet I don’t know how to switch off the emotions that trigger it. Attempts at replacing the fear and anger and so forth with false bravado have failed miserably. A stronger person would be better able to conceal those uncomfortable emotions, presenting a stoic exterior in public and reserving tearful breakdowns for private time. Perhaps the best solution is to avoid opportunities for public humiliation. Stay at home, keep conversations by phone or computer short and focused on other matters, and keep people at arm’s length.

Crap. I can’t even keep my whip-saw emotions in check on the page. My fingers let loose with minds of their own. I think my fingers are deviant; they do not adhere to instructions sent to them by my brain. They reject instructions they find offensive or inane, opting instead to jab the keyboard as they see fit.

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I can see a story forming out of that idea. A would-be writer who is too lazy and too unsure of his abilities to attempt to get published discovers over a period of weeks that his fingers are receiving their instructions from somewhere else; they type not what the writer instructs them to type but, instead, what another writer tells them to type. The other writer, a well-known published author, has lost control of his fingers to crippling arthritis and he can no longer speak into a microphone, due to the deterioration of his vocal chords as a result of a lifetime of two-pack-a-day smoking. But the published author discovers his psychic ability to control the fingers of others. The published author has tried several others, but until he finds this one guy, he has been dissatisfied with the speed and certainty of their keystrokes. Now, though, he has found the right one!  Okay, there’s the seed of the story. Now, the question is whether it will ever be written. Silly question! Of course not. The seeds never sprout into full-grown trees; even the bushes usually wither and die before reaching maturity.

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The Garage Door Guy came out day before yesterday and adjusted my garage door. At my request, he said he would return the next day (yesterday) and replace the bottom seal; he did. I was extremely pleased with his work. He, on the other hand, was extremely frustrated with what he had to go through to get the seal installed. Nonetheless, he did it and, as far as I can tell, did a good job. He arrived at around 3:00 p.m., during the peak of high winds and heavy rains caused by the remnants of Hurricane Laura. He worked right through it. I was impressed. The other company I had called, Garage Door Doctor, said it would be two weeks before they could get to me, but said it was too early to schedule a visit. Needless to say, I am no longer a fan of Garage Door Doctor; I will, though, recommend Garage Door Guy.

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For the last hour or so, I have switched between writing, making more coffee, putting a load of clothes in the washer, and otherwise occupying my time by devoting my attention to radically different endeavors. It’s time I stopped ignoring my “chores” through writing and get to the business at hand. So, enough of the distraction, John; get on with the day!

The scream of the NOAA Weather Radio, alerting me to a tropical storm warning for Hot Springs Village, awakened me completely at 3:31 a.m. Only moments earlier, vague noises emanating from my Echo Dot in the next room prodded me out of a deep sleep. Those vague noises, I discovered a few minutes later, were Alexa’s prelude to the screech from the weather radio; her “notification” that NOAA has something to say.

I suppose I could have turned over and tried to go back to sleep, or tried going back to bed, but the bone-jarring howl of the radio was enough to shock my system into full-on alert. The noise turned on the spigot of my adrenaline valve; I found it impossible to turn it off even fifteen minutes later.

Once out of bed, I further fueled my adrenaline rush with coffee and online news, the latter which told me that Hurricane Laura had made landfall as a strong category four storm two hours earlier at Cameron, Louisiana. Forecasters had predicted the storm surge could reach twenty feet or more and could reach inland many, many miles. We won’t have a clear idea of just how powerful and destructive the storm’s impact was on the coastline until at least the early hours of daylight a couple of hours away; probably much later.

I saw a comment attributed to a NOAA scientist, suggesting Little Rock could experience significant power outages due to high winds later this morning and into the afternoon and evening hours. After yesterday morning’s loss of power (due to a lightning strike on Entergy’s equipment), I hoped we’d seen the last of storm-related power loss for a while. I guess that depends on how one defines “a while.” During the last day, and even during the last ten minutes, I have lost internet connectivity several times; if the power goes, so does my internet and my phones. Like so many others, I have become addicted to the communication lifeline provided by internet connections; it has become like electricity and oxygen and public roadways: socialism’s grip tightening around our necks. {For anyone who does not know me, that last little comment was sarcasm speaking.}

If I were a believer in the idea of a vengeful god or vengeful nature, I might say COVID-19 and Hurricane Laura and the California wildfires and the dozens and dozens of other catastrophes and calamities inflicted upon humankind (and Mother Earth) in the recent past have been retribution. Or punishment. Or something else visited upon us in exchange for our misdeeds and impropriety. But I am not a believer; so, in my view, it’s simply richly coincidental.

Yet, I wonder: am I truly as certain as I think I am that everything is, essentially, an accident of nature? When I listen to old Cat Stevens music, I feel an old— almost buried—sense of childish wonder and awe at the world around me. Morning Has Broken and The Wind are an overtly religious songs, but I think they capture childish awe and wonder more than they affirm a religious world-view.  But I often wonder whether the distance between awe and acceptance of religious interpretations of the universe is as great as I think it should be. There is, for me, an uncomfortable bridge between my sense of awe at the magic of the universe and others’ sense that the universe is somehow the brainchild of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. I say it’s an uncomfortable bridge because I think my interpretation that “it’s just an expression of physical laws” is as faith-based as their “it’s the work of a celestial magician.”

I do wander, don’t I? And I wonder. There are no answers. Only questions that leave us empty and aching. I think I’d rather be empty and aching that full of something I find offensive and odious or blindly silly.

I hope the people in the path of Hurricane Laura escape with both their lives and their livelihoods.

I altered my routine this morning, but only slightly. I read and responded to an email, explored the extent to which counterfeit scallops are made by punching circular “cookie cutters” through skate wings—there’s ample suggestions that it is done, but I found no evidence that it actually occurs, so it may be an urban (or rural) myth)—and otherwise consumed time as if it was in never-ending supply. Even Fox News, expert purveyor of abundant lies, questions whether counterfeit scallops are a “thing.” They say, “Instances of scallop fraud have largely been relegated to the dark realm of Internet message boards, so it’s unclear how often this substitution takes place, if at all.”  The fact that Fox said it, though, calls in to question its dismissal as myth.

Then I had an early breakfast.

There was a time when I would regularly eat breakfast soon after waking in the morning. My wife’s distaste for early eating cured me of that. I grew to share her desire to put some distance between getting out of bed and filling my stomach. But not today. While I did not eat immediately upon rising, I ate much earlier than “normal.” I had finished eating my unusually large breakfast (two pieces of toast, two eggs, and two sausage patties…evidence of rampant gluttony) by 6:15. I suppose I was prompted to eat early because I expect a 9:00 a.m. visitor, a guy who will look at my deck with an eye toward finally completing the major project of stripping and repainting, the initiative I began when I was a younger man.

Before or after the visit, I will try to find a garage door service company that can come “tune up” my garage door sooner than two weeks hence. I called the Garage Door Doctor yesterday and was told they could not get to me for two weeks; when I said “let’s schedule it,” the representative said they are not scheduling that far out. When I said, “Fine, goodbye,” I think she could hear the astonishment and disappointment in my tone. So, I’ll try to find a company that CAN schedule a visit. My electric powered garage door opener frequently refuses to close the door; I think the door is binding, perhaps because of a loose or weakened cable mechanism. I am not equipped to fix it. Ach!

I have been wondering whether my house would sell—quickly and at a price I would willingly accept—if were to put it on the market. I don’t know where I would go or what I would do, but I think I’d be willing to explore the idea. A new adventure. I’ve lived in this house for six and one-half years; I feel the seven-year itch coming on. That’s not to say I’ve historically changed houses or moved to new environments every seven years in the past. But I’ve felt an urge to try something new every so often; live a different life. When I’ve actually made significant changes, though, only the place changes; I don’t. I remain the same person. That calls to mind the rather cruel management aphorism about firing people for nonperformance: “You can’t change people. So you change people.”

That’s it. I need a new identity. I already have myriad character names in my fiction from which to choose. I just need a personality transplant or something like it to go along with my new name. I’ve used Calypso Kneeblood before. I like it. I could become Calypso Kneeblood, a loner whose few acquaintances and even fewer friends can depend on him to come to their aid without hesitation. A wounded soul whose hard exterior shell hides a dangerously fragile inner life. No, that sounds a little too much like the personality I’m trying to replace. Perhaps Kolbjørn Landvik, but my lack of a Norwegian accent might raise suspicions. Linoleum Price is an option. Fracas Edward Schlattery might do. All of them are fictional characters, though. Do I want to be a fictional character? Perhaps I already am; a creature created from all the chance encounters I’ve had over the sixty-six, almost sixty-seven, years of my life.

Whatever the name, fictional or not, what fiction would I choose to explain myself? My background, I mean. The easiest thing to do might be to say “I was employed by the Federal Government.” Any further questions would be rebuffed with “I was in the clandestine service, so I hope you can understand that I can’t discuss specifics of my job nor where I worked.” I could then drop hints in future encounters by mentioning, in casual conversations, places to which I’ve actually traveled. London. Dubrovnik. Sarajevo. Lisbon. Stockholm. Berlin. Etc. It’s plausible, yes? The trouble with that, though, might be that I would come across someone who has actually served in one or more clandestine capacities. My fakery would, I suspect, become immediately obvious to them. And that would make them highly suspicious of me. Suspicious enough to have their colleagues who still work in the clandestine directorate. Confronted with facts, I might have to say “I didn’t want to come right out and say I was involved in a clandestine affair, so I deflected attention from my personal engagements by claiming to have been a clandestine operative.” Yeah, I doubt that would work. It completely ignores my career. Unless, of course, I were to claim I had enjoyed a 35-year career as a professional gigolo. No, that’s probably not going to win me any Oscars, either.

My new identity needs some work. But, then, so does my old one.

At some point, the stress becomes noticeable; not so much to others, but to oneself. Enthusiasm ebbs, leaving in its place flashes of dysphoria. A harsh, dry cloud of discontent settles over one’s thoughts like volcanic ash, sucking oxygen out of the lungs and replacing it with chalk.  Nonspecific anger increasingly bubbles to the surface, touching everyone and everything in one’s path.

That anger then ricochets off mirrors and lands repeated body blows on your chest, all the while screaming that YOU are to blame for everything that has gone wrong in your shrinking, suffocating sphere. But you, alone, can see that accusatory reflection. And you feel increasingly angry that your faults seem almost invisible to others around you. You feel a growing sense of guilt that you are somehow hiding the flaws that led to this cataclysmic point. The world feels as fragile and delicate as paper-thin porcelain, as if the slightest touch could cause a catastrophic failure, transforming it into razor-sharp pieces of brittle hopelessness.

You see visions of yourself riding in a subway car, your irritation at a group of three insensitive teenagers playing loud radios increasing with every revolution of the train’s wheels. Suddenly, without a specific trigger, the explosion occurs. You hoist one of the youths above your head and throw him at the others who are sitting with their backs to the window. The force of the boy’s body hitting them sends the other two boys backward, crashing through the window of the speeding train, followed closely by the one you threw at them. The subway car erupts in screams loud enough to jar you out of your trance. The upsetting music and the boys’ chatter continues. Perspiration drenches your shirt and rivulets of sweat pour down your forehead as if sprayed from a tiny fire hose. And, then, you realize you are not in a subway car at all but sitting in your recliner in front of the black screen of an un-powered television. Still, you loathe those boys. You miss the almost super-human strength it took to hoist that kid over your head. You want it back. Because if you had it back you would go looking for those boys, or someone like them, and you would erase them from this ugly, painful world.

Unbridled stress. It is invisible, but its destructive power is almost without equal. Its sharp edges can slice through stone and hope like white-hot steel through frozen butter.

My thoughts, some days, are so jumbled and scattered and frazzled that I cannot begin to capture them in language. I try and try and try and come up empty. Nine or ten incoherent paragraphs in, I finally give in and allow myself to give up. Surrender does nothing for my ego, but at least the stress of impotent attempts begins to dissipate. I’m left in embarrassed defeat. Perhaps I need that from time to time. A reminder that my imperfections ultimately will catch up with me; there’s no use in struggling against inevitable failure.

Inadequacy is a reminder that perfection, or even a tolerable facsimile thereof, exists only as an idea, not as an indisputable truth. I suppose what I learn from this is that attempting to write after an essentially sleepless night is a fool’s errand.

I call it Swinburn’s Theory of Beguiling Embrace.  For the sake of my fingers and to  briefly conserve the alphabet, I’ll call it STBE. It explains the magnetic attraction many people find in church participation. And STBE reveals the allure of gang membership. Let me explain.

Every one of us considers ourselves unique. We each pride ourselves on the “fact” that we are one-of-a-kind, an exceptional specimen. At the same time, we crave community; being included as part of a group feeds our need for acceptance and it assuages our fear of being alone as we confront a menacing world. Yet neither our singularity nor our collective engagement satisfies us. We ache for something more. Something that embraces both our exclusivity and our shared identity.

Our seemingly conflicting needs can best be understood by comparing ourselves to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece stands out as one-of-a-kind, yet the puzzle is incomplete without each unique contribution. But even when every piece has been properly fit into its place, the puzzle remains essentially a two-dimensional image. It seems to take on an added dimension, though, when a layer of lacquer is applied to the finished surface so the puzzle can be displayed as a finished piece, suitable for framing. The lacquer binds all the pieces together into a cohesive whole, recording evidence of the painstaking effort required to forge a unified expression.

Churches and gangs serve both as the finished puzzle and the lacquer that immortalizes it. Churches and gangs “complete,” in a sense, their members. Through STBE, they wrap their members in a comforting blanket, validating the individuality of each member while, at the same time, offering everlasting (as long as the conditions of membership are met) acceptance and embrace. Membership entices unique individuals to become part of a larger-than-life “family.” And, though the family provides the acceptance and protection the members need, it offers each member the opportunity to be themselves within the larger context of the group. Acceptance into the family is equivalent to an embrace, wrapping the member in a protective, loving cocoon.

There’s much more to the STBE, but that’s still brewing in my head at the moment, so I’ll stop and let it settle. I may write more about it later. Or this post may be the one and only time I’ll address the matter. Time will tell.

Why, I wonder, have architects avoided designing steeples into residential construction? Or have they? Perhaps I am simply unfamiliar with a school of residential architecture in which steeples play a prominent part. But if steeples have not found their way into home designs, maybe the architects are not responsible for the omission; perhaps homeowners have rejected designs in which steeples were incorporated. As I understand the term, steeples are ornamental elements of construction, not functional; at least, not functional in practical terms. Maybe steeples are functional to the extent they symbolize a building’s purpose as a religious (primarily Christian) sanctuary? This is supposition on my part. I’ve done no research on the matter; the topic of steeples just popped into my head, a fragment of half-formed curiosity that is insufficiently important to me to warrant even cursory research…beyond a quick Google search, I mean.

Hah! A “quick Google search” reveals an enormous volume of resources about steeples, their history, their design, their symbolism, etc., etc. Apparently, I am not the first person into whose head the topic of steeples has popped. The architecture of steeples has its own terminology, referring to specific components of the ornamental unit we call “steeple:”  spire, lantern, belfry, and tower. My quick search for information about steeples revealed a rich tapestry of the evolution of Americana, including the “fact” that church steeples served purposes similar to coastal lighthouses, except these “lighthouses” are landlocked.

Given my preference for Usonian-inspired residential design and more recent iterations that lack even the limited ornamentation favored by Frank Lloyd Wright, it’s unlikely that I will ever design (or have designed) a house that incorporates a steeple. But, then, one never knows, does one?  Even in my preference for clean lines and the absence of ornamentation, I have room for aberrations. I remember, for instance, falling in love with an apartment building, born of a converted old church, in Chicago when my wife and I were looking for a place to live back in the late 1980s. The building’s Gothic arched windows with meticulously restored stained glass won me over, along with the massive stonework and huge carved entry doors, restored to their original grandeur.

My appreciation for a wide variety of architectural styles, despite strongly favoring a limited number of rather spare styles, echoes my enjoyment of a wide array of music. While I have preferences, I like almost all types of music. That eclecticism is a relative newcomer to my personality, developed sometime in the most recent two-thirds of my lifetime to date. I remember a time when I absolutely detested country music and rap music; today, both genres have their appeal. The same is true of architecture. I once found Gothic and gingerbread styles of architecture patently offensive; while I consider neither my favorites, they both have aspects I find pleasing.

So, what is the point of this morning’s post? I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s just what happened to be on my mind. Steeples. And steeples led to architecture and my experience in broadening my appreciation of architectural styles recalled a similar experience in broadening my appreciation of musical genres. If I continued along with this style of thinking, I suspect I might jump from music to dance and from dance to footwear and from footwear to the sensation of comfort one feels when walking barefoot on a hard-packed sandy beach. Our minds are capable of making enormous leaps, triggered by commonalities as frail as spun glass. That reality is part of what makes being human so fascinating, I think.

In finishing this random diatribe, I want to recall that, when I walked outside this morning around 5:15, I looked above me in the sky and my eyes were drawn instantly to a bright reddish “star” in the sky. I wonder whether that celestial attraction was Mars? If I had been thinking clearly, I could have used my smart-phone sky-mapping app.  Perhaps I’ll remember to inquire of the app tomorrow morning. Or, more likely, my mind will be somewhere else entirely, like exploring the architecture of Islamic mosques.

In the face of challenging ideas and information, one’s mind should stretch like a ball of freshly-minted rubber bands. But whether one’s mind should expand in the presence of such experiences or not, too frequently the response is the opposite. Rather than becoming more pliable, it behaves like ancient strips of rubber left too long in the sun. Those bands lose their elasticity and they harden, turning into fragile, brittle bands that shatter into shards under the slightest pressure.

Odd, isn’t it, that the way to keep rubber from deteriorating—keeping it in a cool, dark place away from light and oxygen—is precisely the prescription to cause the mind to decay?

Does everyone fantasize? I have asked that question for a very long time; simply because the topic interests me. The question is not limited to sexual fantasies, either. I wonder whether people fantasize about houses they might like to build or trips they might want to take or professions they might wish to have chosen. All sorts of things like that. And things not like that.

A fantasy I’ve had involves the ability to cause others to reveal their fantasies to me. Imagine, for example,  you get on a bus (either pre-COVID-19 or post-COVID-19) and sit near the driver. You strike up a conversation with the driver, eventually leading you to say, “Tell me about your fantasies. What do you fantasize about?” Now, sit back and listen to the driver’s detailed explanation of her daydreams or wishes or desires or…whatever you call them.

The fantasy does not have to involve a complete stranger, either. Consider the same scenario, but this time the target of your supernatural ability to draw out secrets is someone in your church or a clerk you see regularly at the grocery store or even your own spouse. Oh, that may be getting a little too close. Would you really want to know about fantasies that could, conceivably, be quite upsetting? How would you react to learning from a work colleague that his fantasy involves shoving you out the thirty-seventh floor window of a high rise building?

One of my many fantasies involves living in an architecturally modern house on a huge tract of land, far away from cities and towns and people in general. The place would be littered with barns, workshops, gardens, tractors, chicken coops, and vast pastures where horses and cows would wander freely. I envision this isolated place might be in New Zealand or Scotland or…I don’t know, somewhere different but where, when I must interact with people, I could speak the language.

Yet another fantasy is at odds with that one. This other fantasy has me living in an apartment in a crowded neighborhood in a big city. At the street level, merchants who sell vegetables and fresh meats and flowers and sandwiches and all manner of other stuff would set up shop very early every morning. When I go down to take my dog for a walk, I would encounter dozens of people I see regularly, including some who I would call friends. The neighborhood is a close-knit enclave in a big, impersonal city that offers everything I might want. Except vast open spaces and utter solitude.

There are more. Many more. You who are reading these words might discover, if you could draw from me a complete revelation of my fantasies, that you play a part in some of them. Perhaps just a bit part. Perhaps a major role. Perhaps not. In some of these fantasies of mine, I discover that I do not play a role; it’s as if I am looking at another person’s life, but experiencing it through my emotional filters. It’s hard to explain. Imagine looking into a mirror and seeing a reflection of whatever is behind you, but not seeing your image. That’s it. Now you’ve got it.

Sometimes, fantasy is the only safe place you can go to escape the crushing reality of life closing in around you. Even though it is a temporary respite, it acts like a safety net, preventing the fall all the way to the ground from the thirty-seventh floor; the net catches you after you’ve fallen only one or two stories.

Very early this morning, I skimmed a few articles that described dissociative identity disorder (DID), a psychological affliction that used to be described as multiple personality disorder. Maybe that’s what triggered my thought about fantasies; perhaps DID is a greatly amplified version of multiple fantasies that consume one’s mental life? Probably not. DID sounds like the outgrowth of some horrendous experiences during the early years of one’s life. Parenthetically, I was reading about DID as background to a story I’m contemplating, not because I think I suffer from it. I also read about hypochondriasis and thought how much more difficult it might be for health care professionals to treat hypochondriasis that involves a mental affliction, as opposed to a physical affliction. Maybe that will find its way into my story.

I wonder whether my writing is simply an expression of some of my fantasies, a way to express them without revealing that they are mine? How silly to wonder about that! Of course! But only sometime. The trick is to differentiate between fiction, fact, and fantasy. I cannot always make the distinction.

This blog is littered with the retelling of a thousand of my fantasies. Most involve desolation, isolation, solitude. I wonder whether I belong on a planet I have to share with other people? I wrote, once, that in my daydreams of solitude I find solace; solace is comfort in sorrow or misfortune, or the alleviation of distress or discomfort. Where the hell is all this sorrow, discomfort, distress, etc. coming from? I think its source must be the same as my fantasies.

Our paths follow an elliptical orbit around secrets we simply cannot unlock, secrets hidden not through willful disguise but by natural obscurity, the same way some sounds are withheld from our ears but given freely to the ears of dogs, who become our masters when we let our guards down. The complexity that bedevils our waking hours and sets us afire with passion for answers always leads us to the…certainty that life is what it is, nothing more.

I extracted those words from something I wrote more than four years ago. That span of time seems like a thousand lifetimes, now.

A few months later, I wrote from a different perspective, one in which I was more certain than was reasonable or legitimate. My words revealed an emotion intertwined with optimism and fear, an emotion impossible to name, but harder still to escape.

Even on this day, this day beginning with such sparkling promise, I can’t help but allow my thoughts to be swarmed by the ripples, when I should permit my mind to marvel at the still waters. I am a man awash in abundance, yet I worry that the bounty is, perhaps, undeserved. No, that is a lie. I am certain my largess was an inadvertent mistake of the universe, given to me by accident. My worry is that the universe will discover its blunder and will come calling to correct the snafu.

A swirl of events I could scarcely have imagined then have since consumed the planet and the people on it in a firestorm of chaos and uncertainty. Perhaps the universe followed me on that elliptical orbit and unlocked the secret for me; maybe the blunder has been discovered and is being corrected.

There are no predetermined courses of action; only random intersections between time and circumstances over which we might have exercised control had we had known the likely outcome of our actions or inaction. But life is what it is. “What if” begins announces a nonsensical question that can never lead to a realistic answer. The junction between what is and what might have been is riddled with billions of events, each one independent on every other one, except when randomness says otherwise.

That randomness can throw a steel wrench into the precision workings of a finely-tuned engine that is as powerful as the sun and as delicate as blown glass. A tiny, insignificant event can trigger cataclysmic results; imagine a broken axle on a vehicle crossing a railroad track in front of a passenger train, just as the train reaches a bridge over a deep canyon. The derailment could kill hundreds; all because a tiny stress crack in the axle finally gave way.

Yet the same randomness can deliver world leaders and great composers and vaccines that save millions from the scourge of polio or measles. “The right place at the right time,” coupled with the right upbringing and the right nourishment and the right education and the right resources. Snatch away any of those elements and our reality might be utterly different; no Gandhi, no Bach, swarms of crippling diseases, and horrible health challenges and death accelerated by the unholy spread of natural decay.

It would be so easy to just give up, telling ourselves we are impotent in the face of the randomness of the universe. But we are not impotent. We do not always win in our efforts to outwit the forces of randomness, but our efforts are more likely to have positive results than to fall short. Too often, we confuse randomness with intent; the universe is not engaged in an intentional struggle against us. If there’s any intent in the mixture, it’s our intent to overcome the randomness of the universe. Yet, when we act as if we are at war with the universe, randomness quickly puts us in our place.

The universe has not discovered its blunder with me; randomness might address the blunder, but I can and should attempt to put randomness to good use to my benefit and to the benefit of everyone in my sphere…my sphere being the planet on which I live. I struggle with more than enough weight to squash me if I let it, but I won’t let it. I’ll ponder over how it might be easier to just give in and let Sisyphus’ boulder roll down the hill and crush me, but I disregard that possibility and will choose to keep rolling that boulder up the incline, all the while keeping an eye out for random rocks I might wedge beneath the weighty stone.

My mood this morning is an odd mix of optimism and realistic defeatism. In my mind’s eye, I see a mural of inspirational posters on one wall and hundreds of hand-printed flyers lamenting every conceivable failure on another. Were I a painter, I could paint the image far better than I can describe it in words. But I’m not a painter. And my words seems to have abandoned me at just he moment I need them most. That’s randomness. Optimism with smudges and a misdirected finger. That is, I’ve gone slightly off course and I need to get away from the track before the train comes or accept responsibility for its derailment.

Whatever it was—stomach bug, psychosomatic illness, food poisoning, malaria—seems to have largely disappeared. I would give my sensation of health a solid 80 on a scale of zero to one hundred. Yesterday, it was closer to 50. Thirty points makes a huge difference.

I felt well enough last night to pan-sear a small hunk of skin-on salmon, the one and only food I consumed yesterday. I should have steamed some veggies, perhaps, and cooked a bit of rice to go with it, but I wasn’t feeling sufficiently good to go that far. So salmon was it. I marinated the fish for a good ten minutes in a mixture of lime juice, minced ginger root, and honey, then seared it. I reserved some of the marinade before I poured it over the fish. After I cooked the salmon, I added a touch of soy sauce to the reserved marinade and drizzled it over the fish. It was quite tasty. But even that minor amount of cookery drained me of energy; I was wise to skip the side dishes.

The chunk of salmon was too big for one serving, so before I marinated it, I carved off a sizable piece; I’ll have that for breakfast this morning. I think. I have in mind making a nice little Japanese-inspired breakfast of salmon, rice, miso soup, and sliced cucumber. But that’s beginning to sound like a lot of work and too time-consuming; we’ll see. I may not have adequate time to shower, shave, get dressed, make breakfast, AND get to the grocery store by 9:00 a.m. to pick up the order I placed online yesterday. I assumed I’d be awake and alert far earlier than I was this morning; again, it was well after 6:00 that I got out of bed—two consecutive days of sleeping in much later than I like. I guess I’m in the throes of recovery from whatever it was.

After picking up my groceries and putting them away, I will take some magazines and a book to the rehabilitation facility where my wife is in quarantine for another week or so. I’ll leave the materials with staff, who will then take them to my wife’s room. Afterward, I’ll stop by the post office to pick up a few items placed in my P.O. box yesterday, then return home. I’ll spend the rest of the day occupying my time with boring but useful tasks like sorting paperwork and organizing various other aspects of domestic disorder. If it weren’t so bloody hot and I weren’t so damn inadequately up to the task, I’d power wash mold-blackened sections of the deck, douse the cleaned spots with bleach, and—once dry—sand the spots and do some touch-up painting. I’ve said before I need to leave that to others. But who?

I’ve let this post sit for too long. Time to let it fly where it will.

Fragments of complex, semi-conscious dreams populate my memory of last night in bed, suggesting I did get some sleep. In spite of those muddy, incomplete recollections, I do not feel like I slept at all. I was conscious when sunlight began creeping into the room this morning, robbing me of darkness. Normally, I would have been up and awake long before then, but I was not. Instead, I spent what seemed like hours tossing and turning, trying to find a comfortable position that would allow me to sleep. Instead, my movements simply reminded me of my distress. Still, though I’ve been up for more than half an hour, I don’t know the source of my physical disquiet. It’s a bit like a mild headache accompanied by a slight ache in the rest of my body, paired with a more-than-slightly upset stomach. Though rare, this sensation of unpleasant illness is not new; I’ve felt it before, though I’d say it has been years. I do not recall how long it lasted; I hope it does not last long, because I will be good for nothing until it passes. And until it passes, I won’t be able to sleep, which I very much want to do. I suspect this unpleasant condition will last a day or so; it just feels like more than a brief annoyance. Whenever I have not even the slightest interest in breakfast, I know something is amiss.

I tried to discover just how much (or little) I slept by performing a query of my SleepNumber app on my phone. Impossible, as the blue tooth connection was broken with the installation of a new modem; and I haven’t been able to establish a new connection for some reason. Damn gadgetry! When connectivity becomes invisible and seamless, technology will have become a truly helpful technology; until then, it will be an aggravating intruder into livest that do not really need it and never did. At that moment of invisible seamlessness, though, it will have embedded itself in our lives as if it were a vital  organ, required for survival.

Today might have been ideal for me to look for a place to dispose of a now-useless 55-inch television, a cooked DVD player, and seven fried telephones. But not unless I start to feel dramatically better. And it would have been a good day to take a book and a magazine to the care facility where my wife is convalescing; maybe I will force myself to do that sometime later. She should not have to suffer my illness…or whatever it is.

Bright blue skies out the window usually boost my spirits and infuse me with energy; not this morning. The invitation to get outdoors and enjoy the day seems more like a taunt, a derisive jab meant to call attention to my physical and mental condition.

Perhaps I will try to sleep in my recliner, listening to the Spa station through Alexa’s speaker. Try. Try.

The explosive crash of thunder this morning—the one that felt like a huge light bulb exploded inches from my face—struck someplace close enough to fry my 55-inch Samsung TV. And all the land-line phones, both corded base and cordless sets, in the house. And the power cables for the modem and two TiVO devices.  Fortunately for me, I had scheduled a visit from Suddenlink to install a new modem. The installer was able to get the TiVo power cables replaced, install a new modem, and get phone service restored to the phone modem.

It appears, though, that all the phone wires in the house and the devices to which they were  attached were fried. And the TV, still attractive, is a worthless mass of plastic and computerized goo. I went out and bought a new phone, so at least we have one “landline” working now, though it is in what I call the skyroom off the master bedroom; impossible to hear the ring unless present in the room. I guess I’ll have to buy a new cordless set and put the base in that room; it’s no longer possible to put the base somewhere else, thanks to the destruction of the wiring. At some point, I’ll buy another TV, as well. But that can wait. The phone is more important.

I had plans for today. They have been pushed aside so I can adjust. And look for a phone set.

Weeks and weeks ago (maybe months ago) I bought a large bag of new potatoes. The bag was marketed as “crawfish boil potatoes” or something like that.  With the exception of one or two potatoes snatched out of the bag for a quick mini-meal, the bag remained largely unused until last night. Last night, I boiled every last potato from that bag, intending to make Jalapeño Potato Salad this morning, one of my favorite zippy, cold comfort foods. Unfortunately, I failed to double check that I had all the ingredients; this morning, I discovered that I was missing two key components: John’s Jalapeño Paste and cilantro. I can leave out the cilantro, although grudgingly. But John’s Jalapeño Paste is the foundation upon which the dish is built. Oh, I had John’s Jalapeño Paste, but the container in which it was stored had sprouted mold while sitting, weeks on end, in the refrigerator. I made too much and used it too sparingly. Plus, I did not sterilize the plastic squeeze bottle in which I had stored it. Little mistakes had blossomed into the makings of a tragedy.

Fortunately, I was able to recover. In place of two tablespoons of my homemade John’s Jalapeño Paste, I opted to use a single tablespoon of El Yucateco Habanero Salsa, the wicked red version. And I opted to forego the cilantro, though I may make a trip to the grocery store to buy a bunch or two (my recipe calls for half a bunch, but more can’t hurt). It’s a very good thing I decided to use only a single tablespoon of the habanero salsa; had I used two, the dish might have been too hot for my taste buds. As it is, though, I like it. I still prefer the flavor with jalapeños, but it is quite tasty and will serve me well. I’m considering the possibility of having potato salad for breakfast. I probably won’t, but the idea holds more than a little appeal.

+++

Claps of thunder, which began two or three hours ago, have grown much louder and more sinister in the last forty-five minutes. Heavy rain, brilliant flashes of lightning, and monstrous concussions of the clashing swords of atmospheric gods hold my attention. Incessant guttural growls, remnants of the thunderous blows landed moments earlier by one god or another, remind me that the sky above me is angry. From the vault of heaven I hear the shrieks and bellows of enraged players launching merciless attacks on the clouds that would dare confront them. The sky is alive and dangerous, seeking revenge for any number of wrongs the Earth and its inhabitants have inflicted on it. This, my friends, is the end-times for the night that tortured me with horrible cramps in my lower calves; the night deserves the butchery that is carving out a grey day from the ink-black sky. Honestly, if the nighttime is responsible for my leg cramps, night should be forever banished from the reality of this and every day. The pain in my legs remains very real, as if my muscle memory is etched into my psyche with acid.

+++

Christ! Lightning just struck someplace so close to me the crack was like an enormous light bulb exploded an inch from my face. I will turn off my computer now and hide.

The weather prognosticators say the high temperature today will reach ninety degrees. That means the air will warm twenty-two fahrenheits beyond its current level, a cool sixty-eight (which does not feel awfully cool, thanks to the beastly humidity). An acquaintance, a woman I’ve never met, writes of temperature in that way; she describes the measurement of heat and cold not in degrees, but in fahrenheits. I like that. Perhaps it’s because that quirky linguistic style is similar in some ways to my own. For example, I expand the query “how long?” into “how many more long-times?” There’s no reason for it, other than silliness; that’s reason enough, though. Silliness helps protect us from the full force of the body blows the Universe throws at us. Silliness is among the reasons children are so resilient; if children experienced the world through the jaded lens of an adult, they would become brittle and breakable far sooner than they do.

Last evening, before she cut my hair, a friend said I (indeed, all adults) have a child inside. She suggested, in a manner of speaking, we should allow that child outside to play. Adulthood is stressful enough without binding and gagging that child, forcibly chaining him in a soundproof room. To emphasize her point, my friend shared with me a book to share with my wife. My friend thinks, rightfully so, my wife will enjoy the book; after reading only the title, I knew I would, as well. The book:  You’re Only Old Once: A Book for Obsolete Children, by Dr. Seuss.

The difference between juvenile silliness and adult silliness is simply a matter of soph—istication. Adult silliness carries with it a message that may or may not be nuanced, while juvenile silliness often is just raw, unfettered nonsensical absurdity. I prefer adult silliness, perhaps because I am an adult. Or, maybe, I have a secret affinity for puzzles; I search for the hidden message in adult silliness. It could be, too, that silliness plays an alternative role; maybe it staves off fear and the tears that often accompany fear.

As I reflect on my own history of silliness, I discern a pattern. While silliness accompanies me everywhere I go, it ramps up when I encounter difficult circumstances. Oddly, silliness is magnified at the same time that anger reveals itself; they do not often show themselves at the same time, but in close temporal proximity. Were I a competent psychologist, I might better understand whether that’s simply coincidental or not. I wonder whether there’s a causal relationship between them or, if not causal, at least correlated. I remember a phrase from my college days, “correlation does not necessarily suggest causation,” or something like that. Why that popped into my head just now defies explanation. Or maybe it doesn’t.

+++

Fish. Specifically, salmon. That’s what I would like to have for breakfast today—a little piece of salmon, flash-cooked on a hot skillet so that it has an extremely thin crust of seared meat and barely-cooked, rare meat underneath. To accompany the salmon, I’d like a small bowl of miso soup, a spoonful of white rice, a radish, and a couple of slices of cucumber. I’d like a little low-sodium soy sauce to go with that, please, and some hot tea. But I won’t have that for breakfast, mostly because I have no salmon, at least none that’s thawed. And I’m out of radishes. I have all the ingredients for miso soup, but without the salmon and the rest of the ingredients, it just would not be the same. Plus, to be completely open about this situation, I’m feeling especially lazy; I haven’t the discipline to make such a breakfast. Not for just me. I think I should plan these things, rather than wake up and decide, “I want salmon and miso soup and…” I’m not even sure I want to go to the trouble of having a bowl of cereal. Coffee will do for now. I did make enough green salad yesterday to serve as today’s lunch, as well, so I do not need to worry about that. It’s a good thing.

+++

This afternoon, finally, I will have a telephone consultation with my wife’s cardiologist (who also is my cardiologist). I’ve wanted to talk to him for a very long time about my wife’s symptoms; it took her two trips to the hospital and two referrals to rehabilitation facilities to make me take the bull by the horns and insist on it. I should have acted months ago.

+++

I have neglected our “yard” for months. Weeds are growing along the street and in the gravel-filled beds by the house and along both sides of the driveway. The 2x4s between sections of the driveway have sprouted the equivalent of a weed “lawn” that needs to be pulled up.  Volunteer plants (also read as “weed”) have sprouted throughout the large fields of pine-bark mulch in front of the house. Dead leaves clog the run-off channel on the side of the garage on the front side of the house.  I have neither the energy nor the necessary equipment to handle the necessary clean-up. The guy I last paid to do clean-up was supposed to follow up with me once a month to see if I wanted more work done; he never followed up and I never called him, so we’re both at fault for my house’s appearance of neglect. Regardless, I simply MUST find someone to come do some yard clean-up. That’s going to be my main objective tomorrow. At the moment, I have nothing else on my agenda for tomorrow. If not for my damn arthritis and my damn knees and my damn shortness of breath and my damn general state of neglected physical conditioning and my damn lack of appropriate yard-work equipment, I’d do the work myself. If I weren’t so damn lazy. Tomorrow. That’s the goal: find someone to pay to do a bang-up job of tidying up the “yard.” What other word should I use here? It’s not really a yard, is it? It’s more a “plot” or a “lot” or a “piece of forest land bordering the street.” We really need a more descriptive term; something simple and succinct. I may suggest we all use the term “flottage” to describe the land surrounding our forest-area homes. I may.

+++

There’s a spot on top of my right hand that itches like crazy and occasionally burns. It’s dry and slightly red (reddish, I suppose). I’ve put hydrocortisone ointment on it for two or three days to no avail. I suppose I could try to make an appointment with a dermatologist, but I suspect the “first available appointment” will be sometime in the Spring of 2022, so what’s the point? I could go to my primary care doctor, except he resigned from CHI last February and hasn’t been replaced. I could attempt to get an appointment with his nurse; if I can see her, I suspect she would refer me to the dermatologist, which would accelerate the scheduling of my appointment; maybe December this year. That’s probably my best option. I wonder whether I could just excise a three-quarter inch by one-and-a-half-inch piece of flesh say a quarter of an inch deep below the surface of the skin; would that eliminate the itching and burning? It would for the excised piece of flesh, but I fear it might cause more problems than it solves. The nurse is a better option.

+++

One’s emotions are not as easy to control as one’s intellect. Intellect can be sculpted and shaped with a fair degree of precision. Emotions, on the other hand, seem to sprout in haphazard fashion from the tiniest cracks in the surface of one’s composure. I feel a thousand hairline cracks in my composure. I visualize them as being similar to an ancient oil painting. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is well-known for its craquelure. Time inflicts all manner of damage to oil paintings, from the surface all the way down to the substrate. Exposure to air, which dries the paints liquid solvents, begins the process. I envision the human mind (a combination of the brain and the way we use it) being exposed to similar forces that cause cracks in the emotional armor. This probably does not describe my sensation of emotional fragility the way I intended. But it will have to do for now, because I’m not going to write any more for the moment.

I want to withdraw completely into myself, to retreat into an impenetrable shell that blocks sounds and sights and sensations and emotions. A protective cocoon, a place in another dimension far removed from the one in which we live, might serve to deaden the sense of being bathed in acidic emotion. I’m not the only one seeking that shelter. I suspect everyone facing the frightening unknown longs for serenity. I suspect people in my small sphere ache for peace and comfort and positive certainty.

Powerlessness is among the most frightening circumstances. Being unable to control even a fraction of the world around you must be terrifying. It is terrifying. I suspect that situation contributes to drug addiction; the pain and fear become too great to bear without some magical potion to lessen the agony; deaden the pain. It’s supposition, of course, but thinking about it gives me reason to think compassionately about people whose lives have been wrecked by meth or cocaine or any number of other problems disguised as solutions.

I imagine I might be susceptible to the allure of some of those cleverly-camouflaged “solutions.” Maybe it’s that understanding that contributes to my empathy, even while judging those who have weakly succumbed to the enticement of false promises.

Anxiety. One of the definitions is “a state of apprehension and psychic tension occurring in some forms of mental disorder.”  Another definition is “distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune.” Which one fits me? Which one fits my wife? There’s no doubt we’re both extremely anxious. But I don’t want that anxiety to grow to the level of requiring “treatment.” I especially don’t want that to happen with my wife, who is essentially at the mercy of healthcare workers; I do not want someone else deciding for her that some form of medication might be necessary. All of this is supposition on my part; maybe I am the only one whose level of anxiety borders on a disorder. It’s impossible to discuss it, though.

On my end, thrashing through another day seems almost insurmountably hard. But it must be done and done again and done again and again until all’s well. And it will be well. It must be well.

When I awoke this morning, around ten after four, somber nonsense lyrics and a simple, repetitive tune spun through my head. I sang these words out loud:

Garfunkel Smithers was a very bad man,
ice water flowed through his veins.

I sang a fairly lengthy string of lyrics, but many of the rest of them escape me now, less than an hour later. It’s odd; if I don’t write them down the moment I sing them, they fade quickly, disappearing almost entirely within a few minutes. In that sense, they behave like most of my dreams; I remember snippets, but rarely the whole thing. Yet I sometimes remember the lyrics and the tunes accompanying them for days, weeks, even months. The same is true of my dreams, from time to time.

The rest of this morning’s lyrics were equally dark as the ones above and similarly nonsensical. And they were, truly, voluminous. For the most part, the lyrics rhymed. Something about eating salad for breakfast and growing gaunt and thin, I think. Redundancy is a hallmark of my early morning lyricism. It’s as if I’m singing from a hymnal crafted from a thesaurus. But there is no hymnal; just my brain sorting a massive list of unnecessary syllables, discarding them in sing-song manner through musical lyrics. The tunes, though, always seem to be familiar (though different from day to day, for the most part).

I wonder, am I alone in this behavior that suggests—rather assertively—madness? Or is breaking into unwritten song against a backdrop of unpolished musical notes meaningless? I do not know. And I do not know who to ask. I’ve tried asking Mother Google; she refuses to give me a definitive answer. As I was searching, I came across this from the British Journal of General Practice:

Recurring tunes that involuntarily pop up and stick in your mind are common: up to 98% of the Western population has experienced these earworms. Usually, stuck songs are catchy tunes, popping up spontaneously or triggered by emotions, associations, or by hearing the melody. Aetiologically, earworms are related to memory: auditory information functions as a strong mnemonic. Psychologically, earworms are a ‘cognitive itch’: the brain automatically itches back, resulting in a vicious loop. The more one tries to suppress the songs, the more their impetus increases, a mental process known as ironic process theory. Those most at risk for SSS are: females, youth, and patients with OCD.

Okay. So the tunes might arise as described (though they seem new and unfamiliar to me as I hear myself sing), but what about the lyrics? [Oh, and I realize I am neither female nor young, so OCD may be involved in some fashion. Right.] The tunes are not my chief concern, anyway; it’s the lyrics that emerge, fully-formed as if written before I thought them, from my mouth. Mother Google sometimes fails me. Or, perhaps, I’m asking her the wrong questions.

+++

Last night, I spent an hour on a Zoom call with two good friends, a couple I’ve known for longer than I’ve been married. I’m afraid I was not particularly good company but they lifted my spirits by expressing interest in my life, my experiences, my thought processes. I indulged myself by talking about myself. Our conversation only rarely involved their lives, their experiences, their thought processes. It’s embarrassing to realize, after the fact, how self-absorbed I must appear; and, I suppose, I must be. Yet they patiently let me be self-absorbed. Those are the kinds of friends we all need; people who, by their very presence, bring comfort. I hope I am that kind of person when that’s the kind of person people need me to be.

+++

For reasons that remain unknown to me, I find certain words incredibly attractive. They appeal to me so much that I seek out opportunities to use them in my writing. One of these days, I may copy all of my writing from a period of time (say, six months) and place it in a Word document. Then, I can run a macro (that I would have to find) to determine the frequency with which I have used every word in the document. I have not done this yet, but based on memory of words I have found irresistible, I think I would find these words (among many others) used with greater-than-average frequency:

• gossamer
• wisdom
• diaphanous
• detritus
• prism
• translucent
• haze

While there’s nothing wrong with having a love affair with specific words, overuse can make one’s writing seem labored. It can appear limited in breadth and suffocating, crying out for oxygen to keep it from withering. Perhaps, instead of using some of my favorite words in writing, I should have those words carved into chunks of mesquite wood that I can hang on my walls. Or maybe impress the words in wet clay and then, when the clay hardens, fire it in a potter’s kiln, glaze it, and glaze-fire it to make a finished piece.

I wrote a poem a couple of years ago, using one of my favorite words: wisdom. At the time, or maybe it was sometime later when I reflected on the poem, I commented about the number of times I use the word in my writing. One might think, by the frequency of its use, I think of myself as having some special connection with it. That’s not it, though. Instead, I think the frequency with which I use is is evidence of longing for something I cannot achieve. Just for the hell of it, I’m going to post (for the third time, I think), that poem again:

Wisdom

Wisdom grows not from the tender love of nurturing care,
but from abject neglect and brutal abandonment spun
on life’s loom from frayed spiritual kudzu that tries to
choke and strangle resolve.

Wisdom struggles upward from the darkest depths of the soul,
breaking through impenetrable layers of heartache and failure
toward the open skies of an open mind ready to accept answers
in the absence of questions.

Wisdom sheds arrogance and conceit during its journey from
certainty, through hesitation and ambiguity, toward doubt and
the knowledge that enlightenment is temporary and all answers
are clothed in fallacies.

Wisdom understands enough to comprehend that we know nothing,
even as we build temples to celebrate the knowledge we one day will
cast aside when we find what we will believe are truths hidden
beneath layers of dogma.

Wisdom is vapor—an imaginary mist arising from tears falling on
white-hot convictions that decay into doubts when confronted
with arguments and evidence, both credible and absurd—gossamer
smoke in a hazy sky.

Wisdom is experience adjusted for failure and tempered by success,
an age-worn garment woven from the tattered remains of youth and
the anticipatory shrouds of that inescapable conclusion to
which all of us come.

This post seems to me a little like I’ve gone wandering from room to room in a big vacant mansion in my head. I’m looking for familiar furniture, hoping to find evidence that I belong here. Instead, I conclude that this place was not meant for me. I belong in a one-room cabin on a homestead carved into the remote wilderness of northern Alberta, north of Wood Buffalo National Park,a good thirty miles outside Fort Resolution and one thousand miles north of Calgary. That’s where I should be. Secluded. Deluded. Looking for the warmth of southern answers in a frigid, wind-swept, secret northern place. Wisdom. That’s where it will be waiting for me to find it.