pause (de)pressed

Music: Twilight Singers: play blackberry bell So I've cracked a gifted bottle and poured a spot: Elijah Craig 18 year old Kentucky bourbon. Handwritten on the bottle is "barreled on 12/1/81." I poured it over ice, and it got that chalky look . . . a sign this is some choice spirits! It smells delightful; I'm afraid to sip just yet. I'm going to try to nurse it for an hour. Something this fantastic should be savored, and heck, today is a good day to savor something. My sincere thanks to you, dear friend.

Thursdays: the prelude to Friday. Which means Monday is coming, just around the corner.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table at the laptop. In front of me a large window opens to my small patio. Along the sides of the patio are various growing things, but my favorite are two rose bushes, planted by the previous owner but quickly claimed as my own. In the bush furthest from me a single stem towers above the lower green leaves surrounding it; it thrusts out the gift of a large, naked and pregnant bud. We are well into October, and I'm surprised to see another bud this late in the blooming season. It's certainly a clichéd , suburban condo sort of scene, but I have to agree nature's gesture here is one of "hope."

In my darkest days, and there have been some, I've never lost sight of a sort of anticipatory feeling that something is going to come, that something is coming, a kind of willful "waiting," and I suppose I should call it hope. On days like today, which was not bad, or eventful, or good, a little sad, but--just a day, you know? I wonder sometimes what it would take for me to stop seeing pregnant buds. Even when I get downright depressed (which is not so much sadness as creeping numbness), I dunno, there's always something about to happen. Sometimes I want to sleep my way to it, but, still, there's an it to occur, or get to, or slap me around.

I guess right now the big it is tenure. Writing is still such a struggle; I've never had this trouble before, getting something on the page. But I know the handful of y'all in academe who read this can identify with "the block." Well, dammit, I gots it. So I sit, at the kitchen table, and blog instead . . . .