September 21, 2007

Looked at my account online and I have $15 in the bank. With the speed of lightning the checks which I have not received from the Lebanon Community Theater and from Chall’s Enigmatic Theater popped into my head. I always think that everyone else has been paid and I have been overlooked.

The level of exhaustion I felt last night even before choir practice was over was violent. Thursdays are almost unendurable. Tomorrow, Saturday, is, I believe, the first day this month which I have not had to mar with duties and appointments, though it will be spotted with chores left undone in the jam of earlier days, in apprehension of those to come. If bulbs arrive I will put everything aside and plant those. Let bulbs arrive!

Dad went to the doctor, who found a spot on his lung. His inclination seems to be what mine would be: I feel fine; I’m nearly 90; leave it alone. I hope he doesn’t spend his last days in a hospital bed being poked and prodded. This seems not to be his ambition either.

Sunburst dahlias and the inexhaustible orange cannas are visible through my study window. Rose of perfect red in the front yard, sailing over the dull green of the dry and sleepy garden.

Later in the day: C phones and says, "I have some Athena money for you. I've had it for weeks now, but didn’t manage to get it distributed." People think I’m paranoid when I say I’m singled out, but I have the exhibits to prove almost every accusation. Moral: Never be patient. Always complain the first time it crosses your mind to complain.

Jason came over to re-varnish his painting, and to take photos of me for a painting he’s planning, wherein I’m a wise man instructing a "raven-child." I think he probably means raven-child literally. I think I will be holding a flower and a hummingbird will be sucking from the flower.

I longed for Jason to stay a little while. For once, the word "longing" was not excessive. He must have read my mind, for he said, "I’d love to hang out for a little while, but we’re having people over and I have to clean the house."

How can I be so lonely and so busy at once? My life, looked at objectively, is the opposite of isolation, and yet I do feel isolated. I can’t explain it even to myself.

Late night: I went downtown to see John’s play, with the great title Twelve Treatises on Memory: An Epistemological Slapstick with Sock Puppets. It was exactly that, a series of meditations on memory and relationship, brilliantly written, not really a play. It was admirable, scholarly, splendidly acted, and yet, oddly, boring. John was testing how far you can take a theatrical in which nothing happens but the full elucidation of people’s ideas and recollections, and the answer is, not very far. You can’t build a relationship out of conversation, even the witty and often lyrical variety found in John’s work, and neither, it turns out, can you build a play. The woman was too horrible to love, the man too pathetic to be a lover, and though most everything they said was intellectually engaging, none of it was plausible, none of it human. There actually were sock puppets, and I suppose they were meant to burlesque the human action, but the human action too was a burlesque. Maybe I missed the point. Maybe the actors and the sock puppets were all meant to burlesque some real action happening somewhere else. Two rednecks from Boone (which is how they introduced themselves to me) were necking in the row in front of me, and I, as a man in love with words, had to account for why that was more interesting than what was happening on stage. I don’t think it was, actually; I think my imagination was observing that the two necking rednecks and the high falutin’ speechifying onstage would, if woven together somehow, make perfect theater. There is no question that John can write. I believe he can probably write a magnificent play. The fact that the room was empty except for me and his students come down from Boone to support him should tell him this is not it.
The streets of the Asheville night were beautiful with kids roaming about looking for the next adventure, with finely dressed men and women strolling after dinner, after drinks, before the ride home under half a moon. On an impulse I went to Smokey’s. I remembered the spasm of loneliness, maybe, when Jason was walking down the stairs. Right at the door I ran into MC from old times, and whatever else the night might have been, it became a reminiscence of things never held all that dear. MC’s hearty, incessant laugh wore thin surprisingly quickly.

The streets of the Asheville night were beautiful with kids roaming about looking for the next adventure, with finely dressed men and women strolling after dinner, after drinks, before the ride home under half a moon. On an impulse I went to Smokey’s. I remembered the spasm of loneliness, maybe, when Jason was walking down the stairs. Right at the door I ran into MC from old times, and whatever else the night might have been, it became a reminiscence of things never held all that dear. MC’s hearty, incessant laugh wore thin surprisingly quickly.