“We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun | A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ’at Annie tells about, | An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you | Ef you | Don’t | Watch | Out!”—James Whitcomb Riley
It’s two in the morning here in Portland, Oregon, and I just woke up—okay, it was maybe an hour ago—from a dream about my leaving college and facing the real world. “Yeah, I’m a graduate,” I said in the dream, “like Dustin Hoffman. Or maybe Paul Simon. I can’t remember.”
In point of fact the only thing the college in my dreams had in common with Pitzer (or Pomona or Scripps or The School of Theology at Claremont) was that it was in southern California. None of the professors were anybody real, nor the students, nor the buildings. The cavernous basement where the Electronic Music Class was held, for example, was totally unlike the upstairs studio where it actually happened. They were all like characters in a play or movie, larger than life, meant to represent something, maybe. Color. Background. Something or other.
On waking up I realized that it wasn’t College that I was saying farewell to, but Life—Life in all its manifold color, joy, and wonder. I wish I could get my mind off that subject. I’m older than I was, but I’m still reasonably healthy and active and my mind still functions. Not as well as it did before I got Covid, but it’s still there.
Yeah, okay, this is a Bleak Moment, as I’ve called them since I was a teenager, after a title of a Wolcott Gibbs parody. (The piece parodied S. N. Behrman, whom I know best as the author of a book about parodist Max Beerbohm.) I wake up in the middle of the “night” (my sleep-period, whatever the time of day) with a sense of emptiness or doom, and wonder what the hell I’m doing here anyway.
I’d rather write than stare bleakly into a nonexistent future, so that’s what I’m doing here. It gives me a sense of purpose. It’s all illusion, but illusions are what get you through life, so I’ll cling to them as long as necessary to get to the goal of it all.
The day before yesterday a large black cat came out of nowhere to attack “our” dog while we were taking him for a walk. We ended up going to a vet because my roommate—the dog’s actual human—was worrying about rabies, which is actually unlikely as fuck, but I went along with it because, well, that cat was acting damn strangely, whatever the cause. One of my other roommates thinks he might have taken our dog for a coyote—we do have coyotes here—I’ve seen them—but the whole thing was a Bleak Moment of a different kind. Yesterday we made a trip to get the dog vaccinated against rabies, on the advice of the vet.
I have nothing to say.
And I’m not saying it very well.
And silently darkness reechoes.
No comments:
Post a Comment