Back at it again, through heavy morning rain and light email responses, siding headlines and staving off headaches, beating back cravings and not getting up often enough for sunshine or a walk. My rhythm is better when the week is longer, when there’s more bodies in the room. That’s what tomorrow’s for, so let’s see!
I sat on a bench and talked to a nice photographer from Pacifica. As others milled around us, craning their necks and trying to take in all the beauty on the walls around us, he mentioned that one thing some of the art made him feel was depressed. I asked if he found it sobering instead, and he seemed to concur. A few minutes before I noticed a sign identifying the exhibition as a triennial, I said something about how it’s been a tough last three years. Oof!
Good conversation all day, excellent food at home, a drive out to a great park to see trees and dodge crowds and mark a pal’s birthday, and even a quick blitz to get in karaoke (David Bowie’s “Time,” for his upcoming birthday, and Neil Diamond’s “Heartlight” for another singer’s belated birthday last week). The highlight may have been prying a bottle capped bottle with a nail clipper and some persistence.
It rained a little today, but not like last year’s last day. Both days, I got in a grocery store run for organic collard greens, then got in a walk. Last year, we hit the local greenway; today’s was along Grand Avenue in Oakland before the box office opened for a movie. It looks like gas is 30 cents more this year at my local station. At this hour, we’re waiting for the fireworks to start before cracking open a bottle and toasting our exit.
We made the most of a quiet day at home, only leaving to pick up a takeaway, putting our heads together briefly on a Thing and companionably focused elsewhere on Other Things, some involving about a dozen Web-ish tabs and some FTP tinkering.
Things can’t go on the way they have, not with rejection of outside choices and rejection of inside values leading to all-too-obvious tragic consequences. I’d had something like it on my mind since noticing a certain anniversary on Christmas Eve, and here it came today, for all of us.
I know there’s little balm for so much of the trauma and lack that surrounds me. Some folks hold signs by highway ramps, while others cope with levels of crimes, public safeties and private discretions. Still, it spooked me to notice someone doing Something Like That in my rear view this afternoon.
The day starts easier and better if you know what you have to do at the beginning, getting out of bed, out of the house, out of the car and out of your feelings, and continuing on until it’s time to get up and leave and get into the car, into the flow of traffic, into your town, into another night.
We got in a little wander along a side road behind the cemetery after a semi-usual midmorning creekside greenway lap. Up the road, it was hilly and remarkably quiet for being close to the interstate: deprecated wooden stairs behind backyards, a random free library box, a few big eucalyptus trees.
A quiet day, doing what I know how to do from experience, vigilant and diligent, fueled by snacks and the stillness of the room, and waiting for shift end before turning up speakers and racing my worries back to my side of the bridge, my corner of the country, past full parking lots at the spot.
