What a sublime autumn Sunday! I don’t even feel shameful for having lolled in the huge mahogany bed under layers of lambswool and goose feather down until almost ten o’clock this morning. We hadn’t yet turned on the heat this year and the place was decidedly chilly from the cold air blowing through the open windows and billowing the sheers.
We anxiously await news of Hurricane Matthew tracking north at 12 mph along the barrier islands including Hilton Head Island. Unless it is swept away that’s where in approximately three weeks we’re scheduled to alight for five months. There are two sure-fire ways to eliminate a problem, at least temporarily. One, drink. The other, sleep.
Before I went to boarding school at the age of fourteen years I lived with my parents and my sister in a house. Oddly I cannot recall any specifics of accommodation while living with my parents (except that I once had an aquarium). But since I left home, I can clearly recall the detail of every place I’ve lived. I tell people that I am a “cave dweller” because my habitations have been on a microscopic scale.
While I won’t say that I insist on winning at all cost, I certainly resile from being mistreated or poorly treated. Regrettably my sense of fairness is distorted by what must to some appear to be a deep-seated psychological defect or inadequacy (you know, the sort of paranoia which attends people who have a “massive inferiority complex” or maybe even just a childish incapacity to accommodate criticism of any scope or degree).
October 2, 2016
Hello, Michael!
I don’t expect you to read this (literary composition “The Toothbrush”) in its entirety but it might at least qualify as bathroom literature.
Bill
PS Some time when you’re feeling especially enthusiastic I would value a summary of your religiosity (I use that horrid word because I want to avoid ascribing a strictly traditional gloss to your thinking although I am of course prepared to hear that you are a traditionalist if such is the case).
It required but a breath of cool air and a whiff of wood smoke to unhinge me from the verdancy of Summer and to plunge me into the unbridled commotion of autumnal sensations. If nothing else it is a reminder of the renewed pleasure of the seasons.
If I were to size up the sum of my life it would oddly consist predominantly of a collection of things, ideas and people from which and from whom I have purposively withdrawn. What in many instances were once the objects of focus, direction and desire have all but vanished from view, discarded as so much errant surplusage It is in part testimony to my fickle passions. It also captures a paradox of living.
It is both natural and inevitable that as one ages and disengages from the traffic of everyday life, one becomes increasingly reclusive and generally avoids involvement in anything but the most private undertakings. In spite of this irrevocable declension I have never resisted a proposal to visit a private or public art gallery. The fine arts inspire me and few are more provocative for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content than the work of Diana Thorneycroft.
Rigid and painful, intermittently arising from the dampened bed clothes. Changed my T-shirt for the third time. Late getting up again this morning, after ten o’clock. Spent the entire night rocking left then right, staring at the iPhone’s white light in the bathroom, finally at 7:00 am falling asleep through sheer exhaustion, encumbered by disturbing thoughts which I can never recall. What a dreadful time to start the day! The lost time cannot be recovered!
We have a number of issues tormenting us. Some are important medical matters; others are just annoying mechanical stuff. My tolerance of unresolved agenda has never been good. My imagination works overtime to compound the concerns. And it doesn’t help that at the grocery store this afternoon the elderly Cheese Lady recounted her story of being scammed out of $2,000 yesterday, poor thing!