Monday, September 25, 2000

 

1:05 p.m. So, I totally cheated yesterday and lurched off to bed without finishing the entry. I know I make up the rules here, sort of, but one inviolable fact can never be changed: We only get one day at a time. If the arbitrary stoke of the clock scythes the night in half, who am I to pretend I didn't see it?

Plus, I really want to maintain my place in the Always burb. It's a position of honor among like-minded crazy people, and as any true fan knows, it's a comfort and a pleasure to be among your own kind. Makes you feel a little less weird, a smidgen less odd.

People who write every day have a strange interface with their reality. It's probably the same one-step distancing that a photographer experiences when she brings the camera up to her eye and looks through its sharpening lens. Or, have you ever held a faceted-stone bejeweled ring right up to your eyeball and looked at the way it changes your view into a kaleidoscope? Or, have you ever gotten yourself upside-down, in whichever way your present suppleness will allow, and looked at the room as if the ceiling were the floor?

I suppose these techniques are all a bonus to our usual reality check. It's fun to watch yourself walk by a plate-glass window or wave to a security camera and watch the funny little (badly dressed, what was she thinking?) puppet wave back. And then, after all that, we go right back to the prison in our cranium, thinking that what we think is all there is.

9:09 p.m. The day intervenes. The day always snatches me away. Today our back gate stopped working, which meant that Igor couldn't get out for a meeting, which meant that the meeting had to come to him, which meant that I had to quickly clean up the kitchen and shake out the rug and put away the newspapers, plus I had to dig through old bills to find the name of the gate company to come out and uphold their warranty.

Long afternoon sun. Sitting on the floor, going through old papers, receipts, work orders and invoices. Those were the days. Then, what's for dinner? Do the mail, do the flowers, pick up the laundry, put the newspapers away again. There goes the day.

Now, I gather 'round the 'lectric hearth and see what's going on in the Big Brother house, (Nothing -- trust me on that. Nothing.) watch a few minutes of a documentary on Princess Diana's dresses and who bought them at auction, and eventually, I clean up the kitchen again and put away the newspapers again, this time in the take-out basket.

I'm reading an article on George Bush by Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair ...

1:24 a.m. ... and now the entire evening has up and run away, and tomorrow's newspaper has already flown over the gate and here I've not yet waxed poetic about the big tree in the photo and the office workers who were drinking beside it, ignoring it -- nature vs. culture -- yadda. In all honesty, I was ignoring the tree myself until I happened to scan the scene through the camera lens and then it jumped out at me.

Yadda! That old reality check, overdrawn as usual.