Hello, and here we are again on a Monday, 6a.m. It’s not what I prefer, to be up this early. And it’s cold. The living room thermostat reads 61ºF. So I put the heat back on, although by Wednesday we’ll hit 80ºF. It’s no good, though, is it, if heat is somewhere else when you’re wanting it? Somewhere else geographically or somewhere else in time, like the future? As a prediction, something foretold? That’s no good. Then, when it’s hot and oppressively so, it’s no good if cooling air is elsewhere. What is this stupid elsewhere, anyway, and why do we have it?
All the trees outside my window annoy me this morning because they are actually quite here and yet at the same time I can see that they will be elsewhere shortly. That is, their branches will extend higher into my view (unless I cut them further) – these trees are literally screaming their elsewhere-ishness to me. And I can’t figure out if it’s a kind of mocking, or a love song, because by being so shockingly blatant about it, so outrageously obscene, they’re telling me – warning me?, prophesying for me? – that I too will be elsewhere, right along with them.
No, I’m not going to grow longer arms, I will look more or less the same. But I’ll be elsewhere, and somehow I hate it. It’s bad enough that I’m here, but to be told by these damn trees that I’ll be gods-knows-where elsewhere by next year – without the benefit of having gone anywhere – is too much.
I’m as stuck in place as they are, but elsewhere all the time. Oh well. What a weekend.
Yesterday was Mother’s Day, a manufactured holiday for sure. But it was miserable on several levels. First, the predicted weather apocalypse wasn’t as fierce as expected, but the weather was just shitty enough to keep us indoors the whole day. For me, that is never good. It usually means that by late afternoon I’m ready to kill myself or someone else. Then, a short text message in the afternoon sent me into a bit of an even deeper hole, and brought back some bad feelings. Whatever aura of “specialness” was attached however weakly to the day dissipated beneath the rude (as in unadorned, naked) message’s impact, and not having dinner out (I was again cooking) made it worse. I was ready to throw crockery.
The children are elsewhere.
All this elsewhere nonsense.