Saturday, January 6, 2001
11:07 p.m. Today's accompanying photo was not taken
today, nor was it taken this past week. I haven't been out
and about and looking for snazzy pictures in oh, so long. My
camera batteries are blinking and I have to get to the
market or the drugstore for more. We're low on all supplies.
In fact, we've been trying to be good soldiers and use up
the vast hoarded stores in the house.
Live life on the lean and mean side. Well, sort of.
Leanish. Meanish.
The photo was taken during the summer, and even during
the summer of '99, I think. Those were the good old days,
when the shadows were hardly long at 6:30 in the afternoon
and the TV show Snoops hadn't yet aired. This movie
crew was just closing down for the day and we were probably
wandering by on our way to dinner.
Dinner, dinner, and more dinners. The dreaded word is
going to start cropping up in these pages again, and soon:
diet. I've got to consider it. Worse, I've been reading an
exercise book as I scan, and I'm sorely tempted. Can you
believe it? One day, a rich French soup. The next day: diet
and exercise.
Of course, I could learn to practice that other dreaded
word: moderation. I am shockingly immoderate, horribly
flagrantly excessive. I can feast and I can fast. I can't
seem to ... moderate.
One of these days. But not this particular day. Not when
I decide to make cranberry cinnamon scones, because I can.
And yaki sobo, just for the heck of it. These spare white
days of January cry out for color and flavor and I heed that
cry.
However, I have been reading about some good, healthy
exercise. First I read, then I consider, and then later -- I
might. It's yoga, after all. I've practiced a tiny bit of
yoga in my distant past, and I know it's good for the likes
of me. It was, as I remember it, slow. It also forces you to
say hello to parts of your body you're not usually face to
face with. Your knees, for example.
But, it makes you flexible and it makes you taller and it
makes you healthy. I know all this. I'm reading the
testimonials. I'd be an idiot not to put down the book and
stretch out on the floor. It could happen.
But not tonight. Tonight I will continue to exercise my
mind with the next Philip K. Dick book -- this time it's
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and I'm pretty
happy to be in the middle of that world, our world, the
world of one of our possible futures.
It may or may not be the future we all inhabit -- some
scientists believe there are millions of multiple
possibilities. In the near future, for example, I continue
to impersonate a swaddling lumpen slug-being and hardly move
a muscle, save for my oculars. Or, I take an alternate route
and emerge as a wasp-waisted butterfly of lithe, delicate
strength, flitting and fluttering through the kitchen on my
way to the garden.
It could happen. One of them will. My choice. I've got
the free willies.
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