Spring (and All)

It's one of those mornings.  I just deleted the first post.  It was just talking.  This next thing I write, though, is sure to be, too.  My mind is not imagaic today.  It is not clever nor profound.  It is dead and muddled and doesn't wish to be disturbed.  It doesn't want to go to school today.  It wants to stay home and watch cartoons.  

"I don't feel well."

I think it is simply depressed.  There are too many practical things that must be done.  It has never liked dealing with practical things.  It much prefers flights of fancy.  

I felt a little better yesterday, so I went to the gym with the promise to do little, to keep it light.  But I wanted to test me knee, so I walked farther and faster on the treadmill than I have for months.  Nothing like I was able to before it crapped out on me, but approaching.  

I've been paying for that little indiscretion ever since. 

But my buddy, the once-famous shock jock dj, came in the same time as I.  Turns out he's been sick with the same symptoms for exactly the same time as I.  

"I must have caught it from you," we both said.  Like me, he felt lousy and barely left the couch.  Whatever it was, I am guessing we got it at the gym.  

Misery loves company, they say.  

At the end of my light workout, I didn't feel so well.  Weak, tired, listless. . . . It feels like a death march. No. . . limp.  It feels like a death limp.  

And so, at 5:24 yesterday, I limped into spring.  Today is the first full day.  The maids come in a bit, and I will have them change the bed covering from seasonal maroon to seasonal sage.  I don't know what colors they are.  I have a male color vocabulary.  Red and green.  They are exactly the same but for the color.  It is my ritual.  

I just Googled it and I was right on.  Maroon and sage.  Fuck yea--I'm evolved. 

I like today's photo, a self-portrait.  Not a selfie, you understand, but it is me.  It is documentary photography with a certain, I think wonderful, aesthetic.  Look at me!  All aesthetic and shit.  I will use this as my photo on the dating apps.  Is there one called Bumbler?  

Which reminds me.  My mother's neighbors are all atwitter about the man across the street.  He is a man my own age who lives alone.  He had two big dogs, but both have died.  He raises orchids and other exotic plants that he sells.  The neighbors find him strange, but he is no stranger than the rest of them as far as I can tell.  Once fit, he, like the rest of us, has begun to experience pains in his back and hips and knees.  He has thickened in the waist.  Recently, a woman has been visiting him.  Her car will be there for days at a time.  The neighbors were talking when he got a new bed.  They are nosy like that.  Her car disappeared for awhile and everyone began to speculate, but when it returned, there was a collective "ahhh."  I have not met the woman, but I saw her from a distance.  She is thin and looks to be younger than he, and I just say to the gang, "Good for him."  My mother says it is nice that he "has someone."  When I mentioned my own situation, though, my mother surprised me.  

"You just don't want anyone.  You won't let them get close."

Boom!  WTF?  What my mother is referring to, I know, is the gaggle of old ladies she thinks I should date.  Love, attraction. . . those things don't seem to matter.  Physical beauty?  Are you kidding?  For my mother, it is simply having someone by your side.  Like most people, I believe, she thinks I've gotten what I deserve.  

Selavy.  They might be right.  All I know is that I fall in love the way a cripple falls down ten flights of stairs.  

I've just deleted the next five paragraphs.  Fuck it.  I should have left the first entry that I wrote. It was just talking.  Sometimes it is better than what you think.  My head is a bucket of snakes right now.  It would have been better not to have kicked it.  

I must go get ready for the maids.  It is spring.  The season changes from maroon to sage.  The creeks are flowing, the sap is rising.  Vitality returns.  

"May you get what you desire."

I must keep in mind that is meant to be a curse. 

* * *

Something occurred to me just before I posted this.  Faulkner.  You can always count on Faulkner, this from "A Rose for Emily" which you surely read along with Poe in your freshman English class.  And, of course, you didn't really understand it then. 

People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized.