I can never sleep when I drink that at night, my wife said.
I was mixing myself a fizzy aspirin drink.
I’ve never noticed any problem, I said.
How many nights ago was that? Three? I lay there like a little doll suspended in the snaky blue sparks of a Jacob’s ladder for hours. Who knew aspirin had that effect?
Or maybe it was pure coincidence. When I drink it in the morning, I’m not more energetic or nervous during the day.
Except, today I am. I’m totally crazy inside.
It can’t be the moon. It’s down to half.
Man, that’s scary, how fast the phases of the moon go. Just yesterday, or the day before, it was full and I was surprised that nothing crazy had happened.
I’m electric today, and out of sorts. Last night I went to my dermatologist who reported happily that I have no new skin cancers. Beta was a bit put out that she will not be removing any stitches anytime soon, but she’s happy that nothing noticeable is growing on my shoulders.
Except hair, of course.
Then my doctor asked, And how are you otherwise?
Boy, wrong question. It totally threw me. How do you mean, I asked, stalling for time.
Shit, I wondered, how am I?
How am I? Shit. I? How am?
Am? I? How?
It depends, I suppose, I said. What you mean. In which way. Which facet of my life and stuff.
I complained about my job a bit, but on the other hand, had to admit that my second, part-time job is fun.
I didn’t even mention the meditation and introspection and what all that’s stirring up.
Nor any of the other stuff. Jesus, I was crushed under a blinding cascade of on the one hand on the other hand.
She was probably sorry she had asked. Simple question, and look at him, I set off a chain reaction in his brain of some sort.
How are you otherwise?

Walked through the winterized park near my office at lunch.
Walking for one’s health sounds like such an old man thing to do.
Tots bundled in quilted strollers and young mothers yapping in heavy coats. Exotic bushes wrapped in burlap.
One foot ahead of the other.
All my life, my feet have turned out. All my childhood this was an issue. I wore braces as an infant, like something out of Lemony Snicket, chrome and leather. Turns out, many if not most babies go through this and it usually goes away naturally.
Walking, just walking carefully, thinking of nothing but this, I notice my feet are nearly straight. They are perfectly normal.
I also wore shoe inserts as a kid, due to flat feet. Of course, my arches are perfectly normal as well.
Parents.
It is quite cold, so cold that I wish I had a hat, one that wouldn’t give me hat hair, but not so cold that I can’t bear not wearing one.
So, yes, there is this. A stroll.

This morning I discovered something else: it is apparently very irritating to certain people? When they are sitting there drinking their tea at breakfast and a chipper and wide awake person who has already been up for 90 minutes? bounces in and tells them? all about the great meditation they had this morning?

It’s more complicated than that, but I won’t bore you. It’s just, I learned, in the mornings, like before 9 AM, don’t speak unless spoken to.

A minute ago it was snowing hard, big flakey flakes of wet snow thundering down like paparazzi at an Oscars party wardrobe malfunction, if paparazzi moved vertically. Now they’re smaller, and less numerous.

The snow, I mean the snow.

Recently, I’ve done a couple things right. I won’t say what, other people are involved. So there’s that.

Had a couple problems with technology, nothing serious. Put my cellphone in my pocket in such a way that I sent 18 text messages to someone on my list, who did not recognize my phone number and gave me a nasty call until we figured out what must be happening. Then I sent an email to a wrong address, thanks to the gmail auto-complete function, which worked out okay because it turned out to be someone I hadn’t heard from in a long time and we had a nice exchange. I’ve heard stories of people with worse luck, who accidentally call a friend behind whose back they happen to be talking with another friend, for example. A model I knew told me about a painter who took a call from his wife once, while painting my model acquaintance, spoke to his wife, then put the phone back into his pocket, assuming he had turned it off, and went back to trying to seduce the model while his wife listened in on their conversation, for around two hours.

Had a cello lesson last night. It went okay. Some romantic sonata by Romberg. It’s easier than the Vivaldi thing I had been trying before that. Less work with the left hand, lets me concentrate on my bowing, which needs concentration, man, in my case.

So I guess practicing? It helps? Also I was thinking about Ruth‘s comment on an earlier post, about Gamma being a good cello teacher with her “alles is lebendig” and I was thinking about that, and how, if my cello is alive in any way, then it wants to be played, and well, and not dropped or to have metronomes fall on it or to be stood in a corner.

So there’s that.

Meditating this morning, I tried this thing, this metta thing, where you start out seeing yourself in a loving way, as a good friend would see you, and then thinking about a friend in that way, then a stranger, then an enemy. This is going to take several days to get through, I think. This morning, I sat down, the cat jumped on my lap as he has begun doing every morning, I got as far as thinking about myself as a friend would, but found myself unable, in fact, to imagine why anyone would like me and stood at the rim of that abyss for a while, looking down, with the wind blowing up through my hair, currently short, my hair, a neutral wind, not warm, not chilly, sort of looking down and not seeing anything and thinking, oh for pete’s sake, people like me, they must have a reason.

So I pet the cat for a while and made lunches and stuff.

Saw some neat collage stuff on flickr, people jazzing up their moleskine journals. Coincidentally, I have begun glueing stuff into mine. So far, only postits with half-checked-off todo lists, but it’s a start.

Making coffee this morning, it occurred to me that it’s been 20 years, actually only 19, since I worked in the same office as another American.

Checking my stats, I noticed a stranger had linked one of my Painsuit stories, an old story, and it was quite good, reading through it. That was encouraging.

I am very busy at work. At lunch I will go outside, into the snowy streets, at least I hope they’ll still be snowy, and walk around for half an hour or so.

We went crosscountry skiing with friends, locally. Afterwards we took long naps. We failed to finish a game of Trivial Pursuit, as usual, due to arguing. We cleaned house. I learned that, when cleaning a kitchen, it is necessary to take it apart first. And that cabinet handles are cleaned with different cleanser than the cabinets themselves.
When I was a boy, a friend got a job cleaning cars. “Not cleaning them,” he said. “Detailing them.” He detailed cars, which I gathered meant he cleaned them super well. So I detailed the kitchen, which I understand is something my wife or the cleaning lady have done on a weekly basis.
CSI came over afterwards, with their black lights and sprays and they said, when they finished, “This kitchen is clean, man.”

Dick Cheney removes his human mask and squats naked inside a pentagram made from the blood of drowned orphans amidst flickering shadows and flames and smoke from brimstone and burning tires. An aide brings him the bad news: tobacco consumption down, booze down, sugar down, trans-fat down, Krispy-Kreme stock down 15%, whatever.

Dick Cheney just chuckles, a deep chortle with lots of reverb. “Buy,” is all he says. “Buy. They’ll bounce back up in a week or so when people forget about their resolutions.” And he shakes his “head” over folly and human weakness.

It’s important, see, that it be clear I have made no resolutions for the New Year. I couldn’t be arsed, basically. Suddenly, the New Year was upon me, just like that, and there I stood, no resolutions ready.
The things I have ended up doing differently, stopping doing, doing more of, doing for the first time, they have nothing to do with no steenkin’ resolutions.
They are, instead, a response to the pain and turmoil inside me. Nothing special, just the usual stuff you run into, I suppose, on this lap of the bumper car ride.

The weather has been freezing cold for weeks now. Everything is frozen solid. White. When it is foggy, the fog freezes.

There is a hydrangea out in front of my house. If I could paint flowers, I would paint it every day for a year and at the end of the year would know something I currently don’t. I would paint it in all weathers and lights and stages of growth from jello-green sprout in the spring (to arbitrarily choose a starting point) to its current brown, whithered and majestic state.

But I can’t paint flowers so I think about hydrangeas on my frozen drive into work. You have never seen one die, have you. They live forever, hydrangeas. The ones of my childhood are still alive, still thickening against the walls of my childhood house (except for the one my dad actually parked the pickup on), or they would be, if the house hadn’t been burned down, then razed for a mall parking lot.

Hydrangeas are my favorite flower; unfortunately my wife doesn’t like them so we get into fistfights over flowers a lot. We drive out into the hills with a bottle of whiskey and she puts a roll of quarters into her fist and slugs me in the head when I’m not looking. When I wake up on my back with the taste of iron in my mouth she’s standing over me drinking my whiskey and saying something about no hydrangeas this year.

In fact, we have three of them out in front of the house.

So one of the things I’ve started doing is meditating in the mornings. I get up at like 4.30 am, 4.45, for that peaceful hour at the start of the day, right, when everyone is sleeping. Feed cats, eat breakfast, boil tea water, make coffee, pack lunches, write in journal. Now add meditating to that. The hour is getting pretty fucking full. It’s turning into an hour of stress; I’m beginning to stress myself in my quest for inner peace. I’m sitting there meditating, counting my breaths or something, checking my watch every 5 minutes.

I’ve also begun making lists. Five to ten items on a postit each morning, which I carry around with me throughout the day, crossing shit off. Or not. I’ve got a success rate around 70%, which I consider good. A few easy things, a few hard things, a few easy or hard things that have been niggling and bugging me and I’ve been putting them off for months or years. Works, so far.

One of the things on the list, recently, was go have a cup of coffee by myself. Because you can’t just sit in a coffeehouse and do nothing, and I wasn’t in the mood to read magazines, I bought a book first. Some book, any book. Some book on Buddhist meditation, cheap skinny little book. I had my coffee and read the book. Mindfulness. Attentiveness. Beginner’s mind. Blah blah blah. BzzBzzBzz. Paying attention to the moment. BzzBzzBzz. What was that? You know how you’ll be reading, and it occurs to you you sort of slept through the last two pages? I must have read the first three pages of the Mindfulness chapter five times.

How is this ever going to work, I wondered.

So there’s the meditation. And the journal writing. And I’m re-reading The Artist’s Way. I had, originally, thought I hadn’t made a lot of progress when I read it the first time, but here I am trying not to write, but rather trying to edit these manuscripts I have, re-writing is harder than writing, and with ten or a dozen paintings hanging around. So I suppose it did set something in motion.

And I’m trying to give my wife more time to herself and more space, same with Beta, and Gamma I suppose. Step by step, whatever. No resolutions, just this step. And every morning, on my way out to the car, a glance at the hydrangea, frozen in the snow.

Whiskey River had a quote a while back, some one remarking how Westerners want to witness their own enlightenment. I suppose I want not only to witness mine, I also want to blog about it. Although, who knows. Maybe enlightenment will strike, and then I’ll just

Situation: you are crossing a large, cold and deep body of water on a stormy day in a ferry that is overloaded with orphans. It tips and begins to sink rapidly. What do you save, an orphan or your notebook computer?