Today I feel like I should write in big loopy letters, enlarge my handwriting beyond its usual size, make it gigantic in fact, so I could fill three pages in no time. I am comatose. While I haven’t drunk anything alcoholic since Saturday, I feel hung over. Really hung over. And it’s purely from getting up too early (5:55a.m.) – and having slept not too well in the first place, if truth be told.
Yesterday felt grand (that is, normal) because we slept till ~7a.m. since W. had that 9a.m. dentist appointment. But today? Back to this 5:55a.m. nonsense? I feel run over. Not sure, really not sure, how this is supposed to go on. Those stupid trash maples (or whatever they are) growing within 18 to 24 inches on the other side – the neighbor’s side – of my fence (all the trash trees are on the other side) are growing ever taller and filling out with leaves, ever wider right into my line of vision. Soon I’ll see nothing but a bunch of green leaves, if, that is, I let this continue. Come fall, I have to get in there, get permission, to cut shit down. They’re not exactly handsome trees. Literally, they’re weeds (a plant in an unwanted place), self-seeded, completely uninvited nonsense.
A. called yesterday, totally disrupting my morning writing (novel), and I didn’t get back into it after we stopped – I had to drive W. to the station, finish laundry, exercise, do a brief Y visit (steam room), before racing home to meet the ClearResult guy at the house for our post-insulation work inspection, then finish more laundry, etc. etc. So the day got away from me, plus it rained a lot. Anyway, A.’s conversation was about staying in Berlin to work with interesting people, and have interesting friends. People here are either boring, or, due to land use patterns, scattered all over the place, hard to reach (especially if you don’t drive) – and ground down and boring due to all the driving and commuting they do. Not so in hip Berlin. I encouraged him to stay in Berlin (even though it kills me to have one kid in Berlin and the other in Vancouver, while W. and I are in Greater Boston).
At the Y, after I got out of the shower and was dressing, I met a mentally unbalanced woman named [X] in the women’s changing room (which is a tiny basement room in a facility frequented by almost no one – something I like because it means I have the steam room practically to myself). She was quite unnerving, with an odd self-confidence and swagger – something that seemed entirely unwarranted, given the life story she insisted on telling me. She told me that while she wasn’t without support and that she has an adoptive family, she insists on going it alone. Because…? Why? To prove what? There was something uncannily aggressive, really, in how she presented her story (and I was her naked, captive audience). I sensed a lot of anger under what was masquerading as positivity, a kind of facade of can-do-ism. I couldn’t help suspecting drug use by her biological mother, during pregnancy. Not alcohol, I didn’t sense fetal alcohol syndrome, but it seemed there had been some kind of chemical messing around with what should have been normal wiring. Maybe abuse, too, and some kind of retardation. It was all kind of staggering. Sort of like going to a bad concert by a manufactured pop “star” (say, Ariana Grande), and getting murdered on the side.