Whole Foods, Starbucks--Flowers, Music, and the Broken Promise

Third straight day of rain.  Gray, damp.  After a listless day of work, I went to Whole Foods to buy something for dinner and saw these Calla Lilies.  Years ago, I spent five weeks in Peru, and we kept the hotel room filled with them.  They will make me feel better, I told myself.  The girl at the cash register picked them up and commented on their loveliness almost breathlessly.  She looked me in the eyes and smiled.  Perhaps they gave me the aura of something, a poet or a painter, perhaps.  

After dinner, I took them to my studio to photograph them.  I need to work, I told myself, and I need to figure out how to make the Fuji film work.  Before I started, I went to Starbucks and bought some Kenyan coffee and saw the new Bob Dylan CD on the counter display.  I decided to by it without hearing it.  The girl at the counter looked at me and said, "Have you heard this?"  "No," I said, "have you?"  "No," she responded. "Do you think it is any good?"  "Has he ever done a bad album?" I asked her.  "Wasn't his early stuff better?" she asked back.  She was probably twenty years old or so.  "I'm more likely to think he is good than you are," I told her, considering her age.  "I read his autobiography," she said.  "He's a really good writer, all coffee shops and stuff."  I didn't know what that meant, but I liked the way she looked at me, too.  

Back at the studio, I put on the CD.  It sucked.  

It is nice to have a studio, I thought, but it was pretty lonesome there on rainy night.  I thought about the girls, the flowers and the music.  

At home, I found that I had won the Polanoid Shot of the Day.  I was happy for a moment.  I put the flowers in a vase and set them in the living room.  I poured a drink.  

All of this should make me happy.  It has before.  I do not need much, usually, beyond some stimulus for my imagination.  I have, I think, lived an imagined life in the main.  

But I could not get happy.  And I began to think this:

One day you wake up and realize that your life hasn't been a lie, really, so much as a broken promise.  

You can quote me.