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Music: The Decemerists: The King Is Dead (2011)
It's hot. But there is a trade. When I walk outside and look up into the Texas sky, I see blue blue upon blue and fluffy white, and its beautiful, and I find myself standing there, in the alley that is my drive, with a bag of trash in one hand and worrying if the sweat in my hands will hasten the bag's drop before I make it to the dumpster. But I was there on the run for trash, gazing into to sky, and thinking about NASA (and its temporary demise), and dozens of airplane flights I've had flying through it, and the little fluffy clouds (and Rickie Lee Jones on cold syrup), and thinking that, first, the sky was something to marvel at, and then, of course, thinking I was thinking of the sky as something to marvel at, and that I had this thing for romanticism and an a secret crush for Maxfield Parrish. But I found the dumpster; and in ten minutes it was time for a change of clothes.
Still, I stood there in the alley for a moment and looked at the sky in a way that was not shot for a movie.
I also have a thing for Lucian Frued, and he just died, and learning that news made me sad today (thanks to a Yahoo news feed). I read the paper today, but Lucian was not there. Just a cover story about the man who flew a plane into the IRS building last year, and some speculation about my university's sports team, and an interesting and guarded interview from my employer's boss (the chancellor, who seems onboard with the push toward online teaching). Sundays often go this way, directing the reflection this way, on this and that. But that sky. That blue blue sky with the little fluffy clouds. It may be a triple digit summer, but the sky . . .
The sky today was very pretty. That much is objective
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I'm sitting on my patio enjoying a Padormo maurdo, in the last inch. I know I shouldn't smoke, and I think about giving up my current enjoyment even as I puff away. Those of us who smoke often rationalize the habit; death is close. And yet . . . .
My last cat (I had up to three at one point), the one without any hair, sits curled up on the bench. She is an indoor cat, but as she is old and a beggar, I've let her join me out here, in her final years. She's well behaved and just flops around in the heat. Watching her curled up now, I'm reminded of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing. She is not pretty. She is, despite her looks, a lovely friend. The Texas clime suits her well. I think William Burroughs would share my affections for her. I'm certain, really.
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I've spent these past few weeks writing. I find I still have too much to say. Having the time to write has been felt-through as joy. I mean, I really like it. I enjoy writing, I find fun, to write (like I do now, though in a different mode). And maybe that's a problem or sort of psychosis. I dated a lady recently who said, "you're in your head too much." I worry writing for a living (which, let's face it, is what I do for a living) may be too isolating. As an only child, the comforts of isolation were hard won---but also in some sense forced. Learned. Incorporated.
When someone like me is social and with people for weeks on end, when there are faces to read for weeks, that moment of solitude, when it comes, is something like a home-drug. I know this house. I know the rooms. I know where to steal a centimeter of toothpaste. I know where I hide the dirt.
I'm sometimes surprised by the projections of others, of what must happen here. I'm folding laundry. We're all folding laundry. Somewhere, on Capital Hill, maybe, the laundry is forgotten and thoughts of capital gains taxes dance in their heads.