Dateline July 2005—
Who was I reading recently who said life is hard enough even when you have everything going for you and your life is happy and easy?
Meowing cat this morning, a morning that is better than tossing and turning from midnight until three or four, but of course, I don’t turn the light on, don’t get up, put on my glasses to at the very least contemplate the stars. Golden sun on the oak canopy this morning with sunrise. Illuminating even more spider webs across the back of the deck…arachnid industry indeed, barely three days since we hoovered them all away.
Jan Morris wrote that the Italian port city of Trieste has an air of melancholy, of tristesse. This morning, I feel like a woman in exile from that place, from a place that would make it fine for me to wake up and have all this questioning and uncertainty in spite of the easiness and simplicity that is my current life. All I have to do today is work on a poem this morning, then run a few errands before driving through the Coast Range all of an hour to spend a day watching the sun on the majestic Pacific Ocean. Would I really prefer to be back in Wilkes-Barre, struggling to find something to enjoy about that place other than the fact that it was, has always been stand-in for home?
I forever assume everyone else in the world has it (a) figured out and (b) wakes up focused and energetic and raring to greet the day, raring to go.
This morning I remember reading in the New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer about the prison at Guantanamo Bay that they are using Yoko Ono’s music played over and over, likely at top volume, to mentally torture detainees. The irony of that. Departure point for a poem?
The public domain image above is an etching by Henry Farrer entitled “Autumn’s Grey and Melancholy” painted in 1884.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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