Foggy, Foggy Brain
December 28, 2008 § Leave a comment
My mother, in her living room
Sick as a dog in Lompoc, CA, post-Christmas, drinking peppermint tea and reading my haul of nasty-Bush-era-politics books. Somehow the books do the opposite of what they are intended to–I find the wealth of detail makes it all seem less horrible and frightening. I can’t blame the authors for humanizing the actors because they don’t, much: the personality sketches are perfunctory and I don’t feel sympathy for the devils. They just don’t seem like devils. Is this because of Obama’s win, or is it a quality of the writing? Or of my cold-fogged brain? My mother and brother murmur in the other room, at work on a series of projects. The main one is scanning boxes of family photos–Mom in her glamorous middle age, my grandmother in love, Daddy doing his Don Draper imitation. The past will always be seductive, never more so when I’m ill and unable to work or even think about working. Does that statement make sense without a gloss? I spent too many years doing not enough to find idleness (which I can’t afford but even if I could) romantic; I may long for it when I’m tired and feel stupid but never think it will equal the idleness of youth when time and the world were vast and gorgeous and could be ignored for awhile or two. I like hearing my family’s voices. I feel profoundly safe. As I went to sleep last night I thought I would be happy living with these two, even if it was a dwindling-world kind of happiness, but realized that in fact I wouldn’t, not as time passed, that this was a fugitive pleasure to be enjoyed and let go of. Johnny and my mother are arguing about whether ’emend’ is a word just as I am wondering whether it is my writer’s history of constant revision that makes it seem that it is, that it should be possible, to go back and change one or two little things, that nobody would notice (and the image I have is the not-quite-dark of a house at night, me on tiptoe going into a corner with a needle, picking up or pulling out a stitch)…
Mostly in the Afternoon 
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