Was Friday too big? I think it was the ribs that did it. Saturday I was lachrymose. No, that's not the right word. I wasn't weepy. Despondent, maybe. Q called to tell me life was passing me by. Twice. He has a new radio show and he's jacked. "Come out," he says, "I'll put you on." I've a face made for radio, as they say. But I'm no musicologist. Anything I could say about music would be dumb. My musical taste has oft times been a little off. It takes time to really know what's good and what is of the moment. As with literature, they don't call them classics just because they're old. I'll admit that I learned more about music from listening to Marian McPartland's "Piano Jazz" on NPR while driving than I can recount. That was a wonderful show, and here, if you're not familiar, you can take a listen (link).
But Saturday was a waste from start to finish. I received a dinner invitation that I turned down. I rewatched a movie I won't name here that I thought had been wonderful the first time I watched it, but it was not. After that, I watched two old Clay/Ali fights which were probably two of his most boring. Why did I watch them, you ask? The first was from Clay's early days before he was a major draw. It was the "Friday Night Fights" in old black and white, the ones I used to watch with my dad when I was a kid. Maybe we had watched this fight together. Who knows? The second came on right after the first one, Clay having just become a Muslim and having changed his name to Mohamed Ali. He was now Champion of the World. But the fights were long and uneventful and I went to bed late feeling I had wasted my time. Hell. . . I had wasted an entire Saturday.
I haven't much hope for Sunday, either. It is projected to be a cloudy, rainy day. I've told my mother I'd make a seafood stew for dinner tonight, but that is pretty much an easy fix. I should spend my day drinking water, doing yoga, and meditating. I won't, though. I slept poorly and not so very long last night, and I will go back to bed this morning when the sun comes up. Does this ever happen to you? Does everyone need to just check out from time to time?
"Life was something you dominated if you were any good," Fitzgerald says in "The Crack-Up." Isn't that something? What a concept. By that definition, you know. . . .
The sun has come up somewhere behind the cloudy sky now and turned the air a bluish grey. Were there a two or three hour sleeping pill. . . .
I took a romantic, lonely trip to Greece once and toured the major islands. It was summer and the schools of Europe were closed, so it was too much like Spring Break there. I had taken ferries from island to island, and really, it seemed the only sensible thing to do. The Aegean is a rough sea, and as I sat on deck looking over the great blue water, I watched small yachts and sailboats bouncing around in the whitecaps making slow progress. The ferries were large and the ships rolled slowly without diving or plunging. As my vacation was ending, I booked an overnight passage from Santorini to Athens. The ship was full, most people staying on deck all night to eat and drink and party. Some would try to sleep in deck chairs, but I was not up for any of that. I booked a berth that turned out to be a bunk in the bowels of the ship below the waterline somewhere near the engines. I thought I had made a mistake, that sleeping would be impossible, but I was wrong. The room, once the light was doused, lay in total darkness. The rolling of the ship was much less there than on deck, slow and rather soothing, and the hum of the engines was somehow comforting, too. I've never had a night's sleep like that before or since. It was the deepest, most pleasurable sleep I've known. I did not wake up in the morning and a member of the crew had to rouse me as the ships passengers were already disembarking.
It is raining now, and maybe the sound of it will soothe me. My mood matches the weather. Mood Indigo.
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