Thursday, May 31, 2012

tracking the mind

Day four in a row working at home alone. The days can tend to run together. Morning finds me waking up as usual at exactly 8:03. J has been up for an hour. We have coffee together and I get chatty. We feed the dog, the cat. Then there's a little breakfast and watching last night's Colbert Report on the computer while J gets ready for work. My getting ready for work consists of putting a sweatshirt on over my pajamas and checking my email. I also make the bed. I can't write in a house with an unmade bed. As we say our goodbyes, I mention something about cabin fever, but I'm not sure that's exactly what I have.

I have always enjoyed long stretches of hours alone. It's necessary for a writer and natural to me anyway. Sometimes I can't believe that I actually have this life. It feels like a daydream I had when I was twelve. I sit on the porch in the cool morning light and watch the progress of my mind. I sure can sit and stare. The creative, the mundane, the revelatory, the anxious, the worried, the doubtful, the meditative, the curious and sleepy progress of a mind with time and space to wander.

This morning it goes like this:
Do I have cabin fever? No, that implies a desperate feeling. I am not desperate, only slightly worried. There was an email yesterday from the landlady. She wants to sell this house in the spring, much sooner than we expected. Could we buy it? I'm used to thinking there's no way, but maybe there is. I guess we can try. And if it doesn't work out, we'll move again. What a nightmare. When will we get to feel settled?

Alan Alda was on the Colbert Report. He has always reminded me of my mother. Not just because she loved Hawkeye from MASH when I was growing up. He actually reminds me of her, personally. In Jungian psychology, we all have a contra-sexual figure who makes up a significant part of our psyche. The anima for men, animus for women. Mine takes the form of Bruce Springsteen sometimes, sometimes Sherlock Holmes. My mother's animus must be like Alan Alda. This thought is comforting. On television he played a doctor. My mother is a healer, untrained but in possession of natural healing gifts. Also, she is funny.

Are we really going to have to think about moving in ten months? Why have I never established good credit? When will I start acting like an adult? Why did I take out so many student loans? Did I have a choice? What is choice, really? Isn't every decision just a combination of necessity and self- or societally-imposed limitations on the possible?

How do things work? I mean, like real estate things and mortgages and filing taxes as an independent contractor? These are all things I have to find some way of understanding soon, this year. But just looking at the words overwhelms me with a yawn. A deep internal sleepiness. Is this normal? When threatened by a predator with spoilage of home and safety, does a nesting cardinal simply yawn, overcome with boredom? Wait, I know the answer to this. I've seen it! She doesn't yawn, she chirps loudly and puffs up to make herself look bigger. What is the metaphorical equivalent of that for me?

Does my brain function properly? Why do so many things make me feel sleepy? Is it because I'm biologically intended to spend a greater portion of my time lounging, like a chimpanzee? What kind of evolutionary madness is responsible for real estate and mortgages and student loans and taxes?

They can make holograms now, just like on Start Trek. I saw the Tupac hologram  on YouTube. A dead man made of light performing on stage with a living man, looking almost equally substantial. The line between the real and the simulated blurs and blurs and blurs, but still the simulated gives itself away  in unnatural flickers. My business is metaphor but all I really want to do is dig in the dirt with bare hands.








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