The last few days I’ve been feeling a strange kind of generalized anxiety. I think I should probably go back to adding in an afternoon meditation… The feeling has been with me almost all week. I described it to A. as “a disturbance in the force,” only half-jokingly. It grew out of Trump’s actions – his chaos-producing refugee and immigration ban, for one – which are starting to look calculated to produce as much frantic anxiety as possible. Early yesterday evening E. called, and she’s in a panic about Trump, convinced he’s going to unleash if not a nuclear then at best a conventional war – and we’ll all be toast soon. Then you get idiots calling for a coup against Trump – whether by impeachment-just-because (he hasn’t done anything actually impeachable) or by a mutinying military (Andrea Cabral and Sarah Silverstein, respectively). All sides are M.A.D. – mutually assured destruction. It takes a lot not to lose one’s head in this current climate.
Add to this the general upheaval of W.’s lay-off, the uncertainty over what’s next in that sphere, whether to invest buckets of money more in this house (where [the street at the bottom of my hill, below me] gets louder by the day, it seems, so what’s the point of spending all this money on fixing / upgrading the deck when it’s not nice to sit out there because of the traffic noise?), a looming “retirement,” possibly forced, but at any rate inevitable as we age… just the general aging thing, and is this where it should happen, …all these questions…
Meanwhile, I seem incapable of reading a book because I’m so busy trying to keep up with my exercise / health regime in the mornings and catching up on all the political analyses published online – a non-stop onslaught that arrives via daily email lists as well as the insights I actively seek out which come from a select (and small) group of people I specifically read on Twitter – it feels like work. Okay, there are extraordinary things happening in the country presently, but it does me no good to be completely hijacked by same.
Yesterday’s “house” work got done: the dryer, after 2-1/2 hours, was finally fixed; the FedEx guy came early, at noon, with W.s new laptop (so I was freed from hanging around the house, waiting to sign for it); the chimney caps are in place. The man-lift is still in my driveway, though.
Also yesterday: a 10-pound boulder (brick is too small) of a book arrived: the catalog for Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965. My essay is a mere two pages of tiny typeface, but the catalog is massive. And that’s just the English version. I might get a German translation, too. Kind of awful, really. Can’t say but that I don’t prefer ephemera – but the show (and catalog) aims, after all, for comprehensiveness. Let’s see if it aims for comprehension, too…
Since the laptop arrived early enough, I had some time for a walk. But by the time I’d finally finished exercising and had breakfast at 2pm, I rested for 20 minutes and decided, 20 minutes into the walk I finally attempted, that it was too bloody cold. A real icy wind. So I picked up some Vera DVDs at the library, and W. at the Depot, and back home.