August 5, 2011

Still, almost silent, torrid darkness of morning.

Kat has dropped out of Vance. She asks to be remembered if some other part appears some time.

Linda and David and Daniel appeared yesterday, leave this morning, perhaps have left already. The boys are alpha males, exactly the sort I almost never talked to in high school. Daniel is so handsome it seems almost artificial. They are full of sports and girls, and David of upcoming adventures at college, but each is the largest piece of the other’s universe. How fortunate to have permanent companionship. Reception for them at Avenue M. It was all merry and happy. The boys had Asheville at their feet last night, and I hope they made the best of it.

It has been a strange day. Woke dissatisfied, maybe wishing for sons rather than nephews. Excellent workout. I took the Prius to be inspected, but before two hours were over I had traded it in on a brand new model, of a color between rust and rose. With the trade-in it was, as DJ said, so cheap it was impossible not to buy it. But I was sad afterwards, as though I had betrayed my former car. Its anthropomorphizing reached epic proportions, and I could barely force my head back into a semblance of reason. It was not the merely car, surely, but something I had done or thought that day brought to mind all the betrayals, or things which could remotely be called betrayals, which I had committed in my life.

Since I was close, the first trip I took my new car on was up the Parkway to Sleepy Gap, where I turned north up the trail that was so familiar, though I may not have hiked it for several years. It had been long since I hiked anywhere alone, and it was a profound, and in some ways grievous, homecoming. The rage I used to build to when I had solitude to contemplate my life was gone. In its place was sadness– heavy, unfamiliar, but hugely to be preferred to the rage. The forest on a summer afternoon was almost unimaginably silent. At one point I heard grosbeaks twittering in the canopy, and at both ends of the journey was the polite, tentative pecking of woodpeckers. It all seemed mystical at the time, though I am not writing it the right way to convey that.

Sweating in the dark as I write. My bragging that I could live my life without air-conditioning begins to seem a little overblown.