Spanish Madness

 February 21, 2026

Talk of Blake with PR. Mixed in with a whole lot of talk about the Prophet Amos. 

Combed the yard with a trash back in my hand, picking up the detritus left by winter. Plastic. Food containers. Beer bottles. Objects whose original use I don’t want to know.  My lot is on a curve: things fly from windows, get tossed from the hands of cyclists. 

Turkeys in the yard today.

Beethoven’s Tempest.

Dream of A, which must have got mixed in with watching the Olympic skaters. I worked to help her keep her studio, an operation accomplished by helping her skate to obscure places on a vast frozen lake unseen. 

The west lot teems with bluebirds. The sudden red flare of the red-bellied woodpeckers. 

The Spanish Madness

Goldfinches

 February 19, 2026

The goldfinches are getting back their summer color. 

Both recent afflictions, the fiery red of phlebitis and the less fiery red of hemorrhoid activity, abate. Some. 

Ancient dream of the first day of school. The University was a cluster of tents. I didn’t know where my office was, or what my schedule was, and all ways of finding out seemed to be blocked. I asserted myself by stealing a chair to use at my desk, when I found it. 

Accepted a Facebook friend invitation from JF. He was once the most beautiful man in Asheville. He isn’t anymore. 

 February 18, 2026

T led rehearsal last night, and it was memorably useful--without drama, without the struggle to enforce wilful interpretations, without mannerisms, without the constant interweaving of mockery and correction. 

My once fairly robust alcohol use has turned into the consumption of rivers of tea. I’ve searched for counterindications of that, but it seems to be all in all a beneficial choice. Sense little actual difference, except that I sleep longer. 

Nap dreams of receiving huge deliveries, by truck, of apples and cherries, to a place I had high in wooded mountains.  

 February 17, 2026

Various hours, various days. Phlebitis hit. I was able to fend off the great sickness, though my left leg is pink and itchy (no heat though, which is encouraging). The pills still amaze me. I rose in the night at the brink of unbearable pain, took the pills, and the next time I woke all was almost well. I think of my mother with the same affliction and, through most of her life, no antibiotics. Several things that were wrong with me and I blamed on something else seem to be related to the attack. It is always thus; I never remember. 

AVLGMC meeting here last night. It veers further and further from anything I recognize, anything I want to be part of, and yet I stick with it because what unfolds has interest of its own, and the companionship is fun. Thomas’ Uber came early, so he had to heat his frozen burritos in my microwave. B’s mania for control would be alarming if it were exercised on anything of more consequence than a men’s chorus. 

Strove to bring the pond out of winter torpor. Had to put my garden hose back together before I could. The solar panel guy had unscrewed the hose from the wall and the two bits of hose from each other, leaving me to put it back together, for reason’s unfathomable. All workmen detach the hose from the outlet, and I never know why. Something they teach in workman school and keep from the rest of us? L detached the hose when he came to give me an estimate on a deck. Really? It’s an issue to me because my threads are ancient, my wrench the wrong size, and to get an unleaking fit takes a deal of labor. I want to stand in the yard and say, “Do not unscrew the hose, though every fiber of your being commands you to do so!”

I discovered the magical principle that lures bluebirds to my yard. 

No music on Ash Wednesday. Things fall apart. 

Jesse Jackson is dead.

 

February 14, 2026

Brilliant day. I went to the Mall to replace my aged phone, but the Verizon people had moved to I know not where. Instead I bought a shirt from Eddie Bauer, because they were going out of business, and a raft of Girl Scout cookies that went straight into the freezer. Each time you go there are fewer stores at the Mall, and the ones you went for are gone. No Valentine card in the mailbox. 

 February 12, 2026

Twelve years in this house. I turned off the space heater (having read an article on the fires they cause) meaning I’m now trying to write in a freezing attic. 

Sat in Starbucks reading Swann’s Way while Iris cleaned my house. What power in Proust, to make one genuinely interested in the minutia–often enough disagreeable– of his life. 

SS having trouble casting Purification. My inner self shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well, of course!” 

Missing AVLGMC dress rehearsal tonight, as I can’t bear to be at the Valentine’s Fund Raiser tomorrow night. There are points at which too much bother is too much bother. Bother is a young person’s game. 

Looking forward to a night of revising, and then hot mint tea before whatever’s left of the Olympics. 

Anniversary

 February 11, 2026

Twelve years ago tonight I spent my first night in this house. 

Episode last night between bouts of sleep, when the image of my pet rabbit Charlie came to mind. I treated him poorly, never playing with him, ignoring him in his hutch for days on end. The unexpected intrusion–how often in the interposing years have I thought of him? Almost never– I took as a reconciliation in the spirit, for in the spirit he came and huddled against my side as we slept, and I was at peace in the matter for the first time. Do we live into old age so the sins of our past can arise and be, somehow, expiated, or at least acknowledged? If so, fine. My father gave me to understand his memories in age were sweet. If I did anything particularly noble, or even amusing, my recent thoughts have hidden it from me, though my missteps stand revealed in blinding light.

Received the following note by email:                                       

Hi David,

I recently read Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers and found myself really taken by it, especially the way the book treats desire, memory, and creativity as inseparable, slightly unruly forces. The conversations with cats alone felt like a quiet permission slip to let the strange and intimate coexist on the page.

I was struck by how Asheville moves through the novel as more than a setting, sometimes vivid, sometimes shadowy  almost like another character carrying both history and longing. There’s a generosity in the writing that trusts the reader to enter at their own point, which I really admired.

I’m MH. I tend to write about the messy, funny, and occasionally heartbreaking parts of being human. My novel, Really Good, Actually, came from a place of starting over and trying to find humor in the middle of emotional chaos.

I’d love to hear what you’re working on now, or what first pulled you toward writing this book.

All the best, Monica

Bought her book. It’s lively, detailed, without forward motion (or what one would call ‘plot.), like a teenage Virginia Woolf at a slumber party.