Tired today. Groggy bastard with the new meds. They’re to clear my chest up, free it, free my mind. Liberate. One can hope. I’m reading, leaned back in my chair, thinking of things. It’s not easy focusing on any one thought drugged up so sleepy. My grandmother is going in for an operation on the 18th. I have an essay due. Mother’s birthday, Sunday. Feeding a friend’s cat next door. Chest hurting from dust and smoke in the air.
Another friend is going to vacation to his native Egypt. I envy travelers these days. “You should write about what it was like for you the first week your wife left,” he suggests. Right now, right now I would say, thinking back to it, it was like a death, a great emptiness opening up, and that first night getting into bed alone was terrible. The following weeks have forced me to adapt. I feel more my own person now, which of course I’ve always been. But I see how we carry each other.
Little Kalika comes to visit me on my lap, swivels her little head around looking at stuff. She is a house of sensory curiosities. I love to sit and read in a chair with breathing in tact.
Just remembering now, I dreamt of being at the ocean. Later, someone turns the waves off and I realize I’m at one of those amusement parks in Jessup, Maryland, or somewhere like that. But I love the water. The waves came crashing over me, pushing me forward. I was body surfing, like in India. That as years ago. I kick myself for barely having written anything down then. That was even before Journal of Thought, my first “real” magazine.
. . .
It’s getting colder now. You can really feel it. And the news is turning up all sorts of talk about global warming these days. Very scary stuff. I don’t know if any of it can be reversed at this point. I don’t know what it will mean for us, exactly, if we’re going to get wiped out very quickly, or if it will be more of a gradual thing. It’s strange, though, that some of these November days, have been t-shirt wearing days.
I go all the way down
4th street
until I can
overlook the highway
and I say
yep, that’s the
highway
and I look
at it for a
little bit
and get bored with it
and then
cross back
over the patch of grass
looking
at the houses again
the old lead painted ones
and it is cold at this time
7 A.M.
a cat starts to run out
into the street
and I’m on
stand-by
ready to jump out at cars
saying, “Slow down!”
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