June 1, 2017 (Thursday)

by Yule Heibel on May 31, 2018

And now it’s June, and now we might get a warmer day. Just for the day, though – after that, back to cooler weather, and it looks like rain again all next week. Apparently it’s unusual only to the extent that warmer-than-usual and drought-ridden weather of the past years has acclimatized us to something else. Well, I don’t know. I’ve lived here, cumulatively, for about 22 years in total and this May (and apparently the June coming up) was the coldest and wettest I recall. w/e.

I’m looking at out mist. Not inappropriately, the word Mist means Dreck in German. Okay, I’m not looking out at shit, but it’s kind of funny all the same.

The atmospherics are actually quite lovely, really. Unlike yesterday morning’s thick slab of utility-grade gray latex poured in one unmodulated application across all the visible sky, today’s weather hangs lower to the ground and has thinned out enough to reveal various hues and intensities created by the sun that’s going to burn away within an hour or two all the wispy bits. Right now, my view is of tree tops in varying states of reveal: very revealed, closest to me (those annoying trash maples), quite revealed (those in the middle ground), and still imbued with a layer of silver that lets them remain partially obscured (those in the background near the ocean). Everything is very wet – the air, as I’ve said, but also the ground. It rained copiously during the night.

Yesterday I went for my “annual” mammogram (I had not gone for two years). I’m really not sure why I let them do this to me: 20 to 21 pounds of pressure, I saw it on the readout. Even though I lately often feel like I’m dying, I don’t expect my mammogram to be anything but okay, unless they make a mistake and need to redo it to clarify something. The tech said, “See you next year,” and I thought, “Like hell you will.” Maybe in two. Or even three. I just feel that I’m in their clutches when I go there. (Ha.) Once, in my late 30s or early 40s, I got a follow up call asking me to come in for a repeat mammogram because they “found something.” Turned out to be nothing, but that call had me in a spiral of despair. A. and E. were perhaps six and three years old – I can’t remember exactly what the timeline was, they could have been seven and four, and I let myself be traumatized by this idea they’d grow up without a mother. Of course the whole raison d’être of services like mammography is to find something, and so they’re very avid to search and seek and find, even if they’re completely on the wrong track. Detective work is not always done by Miss Marple. Sometimes Inspector Clouseau is in charge.

I did talk to W. over dinner last night about my “What if I died tomorrow” question, which I wrote about in Evernote. If I died, he wouldn’t as easily be able to go to Canada. He couldn’t very easily “go back” to Germany. He would in effect be stuck in the US, with not much of a social life outside of work, and with children thousands of miles away. I wanted him to think about his future in terms of taking options away, sort of like a Stoic meditation on death. I.e., you don’t have a bunch of options, they’re gone. What do you do? How do you adapt – and improve? So he said he’d get himself a little (emphasis on little) place (shoe box, more like) in Boston. He’d have $xxx from my life insurance to supplement the $xxx from the sale of the house. After thinking it over some more, he then said he’d go to B.-B. – he’d still have friends and some family there. Not sure if I jogged anything for him, but think, man. Think.

Speaking of: I read (too skimmingly) Rebecca Solnit’s new essay on Trump and found it superficial. Everyone else seems to like it. Must re-read, maybe I missed something. Also, explain to me why we’re going after law-abiding but illegally here Mexicans?

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: