I read a pair of literary essays, one responding to the other, and I felt sad and tired, tired of my sad life, a life all the sadder as I stood at the back watching my finer-dressed betters being smarter than I am. They played some game I couldn’t fully follow - I’ve had the offsides rule explained to me twice yet it just doesn’t stick, and when a push is and is not a yellow card might as well be controlled by the movement of the planets - and the pace they played at spun my head too. They looked so graceful, strong, effortless, young, fresh, rested, fit. It must be called the beautiful game in appreciation of the players. Maybe on the replay at a close watch I can start to understand the moves but I’m not sure I have the time, the kids will be up early in the morning, and I know forsure I could never get on the field myself. Plus, that uniform? On this body? I see now that I never could...

I was washing dishes at the end of the day, which is how my days (nights really) usually end at this point in my life, and I was drinking a little, not hard, not DRINKING drinking, just sipping on something for the taste, and I was watching TV to pass the time. I’m in a lifestage where a lot of my time is spent passing the time - not to mention the fucking pandemic, fuck, man - and trying to get out of responsibilities, bullshit, burdens, hassles. I don’t like to own that (and some days I have urges to make angry mistakes, to be a little more honest).

Anyway I was passing the time watching some TV show about lawyers. They were getting drunk and making mistakes and I thought, fuck it that looks alright, so I stopped sipping and started drinking, deliberately too much. Been a minute, man. Used to be a real life priority, back when I had priorities not entirely set by socially imposed...

I took my youngest daughter to the library today. I didn’t plan to. A bunch of my holds had come in so I had to go and she wanted to come along so I brought her with.

We wore masks. I feel uncomfortable continuing to wear a mask given the shifts in policy and attitude on mask wearing but I feel less comfortable going unmasked given the risks, especially since my kids are unvaccinated.

I have begun to resent new aspects of the Biden years. In the Trump years I could feel somewhat proximate to liberal friends and colleagues in a shared dislike of some things even if we arrived at that dislike differently. Now under Biden, as depoliticizing and looking away are becoming more the norm, I am back to feeling on the outs like I did under Obama, pulled between pretending to be someone I’m not in various ways - smiling and nodding, mostly - or being more honest and getting looks and watching...

I’ve been making an effort to get my older daughter to take a walk with me once a week or so. It’s nothing fancy. We just hold hands and walk a block or two or three. I ask her questions trying to get her to talk, usually about books she’s reading, and we trade observations of stuff we see.

Tonight we walked past the house with the chickens and turkeys (there are lots of houses with chickens around here but only one with turkeys) and the gate in their fence was open. I said maybe the chickens had run away, or maybe they were all bedded down in their hen house and so didn’t need the gate closed. She suggested they had gone away to their other home, a palace where they take vacations - short ones, because if they’re gone too long the people start to worry and also might replace them.

One of us suggested they might have their palace underground, which led to a long side topic of whether...

A gust and a creak, our house turns sonorous, plucked like a guitar string by the wind. With each of the building’s groans I picture a beam swaying behind the plaster, imagine a crack opening in the wall. The house sounds from its flaws and weaknesses, in my mind. This is a metaphor as well for my memories. The breeze of a chance line in a novel, read off the page for a writing exercise, and a retaining wall in my personality rasps, sounding a bad memory - my dad, shouting, my mom, shouting. This response to the wind is evidence of a broken structure always about to break through the paint hiding it, in my mind. Changing the metaphor I picture out of tune wind chimes playing an ugly chord, bad memory clanging into bad memory into bad memory. That captures the noise and duration of it better, but also better states - makes - the truth of the matter: it’s just noise, nothing is falling...

Botched attempts

Attempt the first, begun in desperation.
Most “can’t”s are “won’t”s is a bit of cant I’m wont to cart out now and again. Another is “Can’t write? Then write about how you can’t write.” I suppose that can be done, but no one will want to read it. That’s one of the troubles - starting to wonder if anyone will want to read it. It’s odd how writing is a kind of connection to someone else but the connection if approached too directly can fall apart, often needs to be circled around to from the side.

Type it badly, edit it better, I suppose, and type your way to feeling better as well. Is that the point? To dignify a lived shambles with clacking? No. Really, no. The goal isn’t a product but a flow state, and a self-fashioning - get up off the floor and over and over until it’s not hard.

Attempt the second, begun in frustration.
Sometimes I think the point of doing much at...

I’m afraid of the coming winter. In my mind pandemic life has meant never leaving the house but really I’ve taken walks around the neighborhood, run around in the yard, gardened a little. Moving around has been a way to pump the brakes when I’ve felt my mind fishtailing. Going outside has also meant some level of contact with other people - neighbors lobbing hellos across the street with a wave of the arm enacted by the whole body.

Sam - from three houses down and originally from, according to different neighbors, Vietnam, Cambodia, or Burma - nods vigorously when I call his name, calling back “Good! You good?” “Yes, I’m good. You doing good?” “Good, yes good, all good, very good!” If he sees me first he asks “good?” Another Sam, half a block down, had a newborn baby over the summer. He said “you got a big baby, mine’s just two weeks!” the first time we talked, me carrying my then two...

I have begun to think of the pandemic as a distortion effect, a caricature, a funhouse mirror. Everything it does now in the endless During Times already happened in the Before Times, but now more so, exaggerated to a breaking point. I had the thought periodically Before that my life was small and tightly circumscribed - parent and prepare, commute, work, commute, parent and prepare, frantic leisure moments, sleep, repeat, and once in a while on a weekend go on an outing, all in a total space maybe 4 miles wide - but now my life is more so. I commute to another room in the house and my outings are down the hill of our street and back, all in a total space maybe 4 blocks wide; otherwise all continues apace within my immediate small sphere. Of course the solar system in which my small sphere orbits has become far more erratic. Perhaps things will break down dramatically - I can lose sleep...

For three days now I walk the garden at periodic intervals. In one hand I hold a thirty two ounce former yogurt container, refilled with water and a splash of dish soap, foamed up into about an inch of thick white suds at the top. In the other hand I hold a stick longer than my forearm and smaller around than my littlest finger. I circle the front and back gardens peering at leaves, buds, flowers, looking for Japanese beetles. The black-legged and shining copper-green interlopers arrived earlier this week. I took a day or two before I worked up the energy to undertake their extermination.

I define my loop around the garden by the evening primrose. They open at night, hence the name, a bright yellow flower that reflects so much light that under a bright moon they seem to glow. The beetles love to eat their triangular green leaves. Later in the season they will turn to the rose mallow...