Dirty Romantic

The days are already shorter here.  I was caught by surprise last night coming home after dinner.  I don't carry a watch and never think to look at the time on my cell phone which I normally don't have with me anyway.  Thinking it was late, I walked in through the kitchen door and turned on the light.  8:20.  I know, but it caught me by surprise.  It had already been dark for awhile.  I am excited to see the shadows a month from now.  Shorter days don't excite many people, I think.  But what daylight there is then is better, richer, clearer and bluer.  Here, that is.

I watched a not so good movie about Tolstoy and his wife last night.  "Naive romanticism" was a phrase in that movie delivered as an epithet by a brazen Tolstoyen revolutionary.  "But what of those of us," I thought sitting there upon my couch, "who are romantics in the not-so-naive sense?"  Dirty Romantics, perhaps.

After dinner, I went to an outdoor bar for a Bellini.  The night was too warm and the champagne not chilled right and all the people at the bar were out of place.  I assumed that included me.  It is harder to find a good place now that the economy has gone bad, even in the most spectacularly monied of neighborhoods.  No one goes out, it seems.  It reminds me of the '70s, really, when my life was nothing but working and loafing and getting by.

I cheated yesterday and stayed home from work.  I was exhausted.  I ate and walked and lay in the sun and slept.  And I began to heal knowing there were three more days like this before me.  I am disturbed that I did not find the energy to go somewhere, someplace out of town, but it never seems appealing when everyone else is doing it.  The official vacation, etc.  I've decided, rather, to steal some time in a week or two and go somewhere.  Perhaps to the Texas State Fair in Dallas.  Man, that might be something.  It may be a pipe dream, though.  Pipe dreams.  Now there's an idea for tonight.  If only. . . .