August 8, 2011

Massacre in Copley. One never expects to type those words.

Maud was relating to something in the back yard before dawn. I turned the light on to expose a little opossum scrounging around on the terrace.

Digging and weeding so that the stone back stairs are now completely revealed, perhaps for the first time since I’ve lived here. It actually looks quite noble.

Dream of chasing a lost kitten into Mr Ralphsnyder’s yard, and finding there a menagerie, teaming and mysterious, some of the creatures extinct elsewhere.

Met RN and two handsome sons at the Newbridge Café. Tried to think of an excuse to invite them to eat with me, but nothing surfaced in time.

S&P downgrades the US credit rating, an almost unbelievable deed of arrogance and self-delight, distinguished from most deeds of arrogance and self-delight in that it cost real people hundreds of thousands in real wealth. Justice would mean annihilation for this self-serving organization, that they might contemplate the place in history they made for themselves in the unemployment line. But the deed does have the effect of embarrassing the right people, and maybe that justifies it minimally. The hysterically partisan brinksmanship of the Republican Party needs to be remembered in the roll call of idiocy. They did ask for it. There are so few things– violence in Ulster, the Opium Wars-- where all the blame is on one side, that one wonders at them, and welcomes with awe one more– the American budget catastrophe of 2011-- among their number

Arrived at the Y apparently at peak time, and decided to do a zumba class rather than wait for the weights. It was hell. It was hell in ways that are difficult to convey, as I suppose the hellishness of hell is too. Overcrowded; overcrowded, with latecomers pushing in nevertheless; showoffs blocking your view so you had only a vague notion of what the leader was doing; big stinky fat guy making part of the already crowded room uninhabitable; women piling their bags and shoes on the floor for you to trip on, as there’s evidently something declasse about the women’s locker room; everyone rushing past you to “hydrate” between songs, as though one cannot go five minutes without a drink; the motions, when you can see them, too subtle and intricate and arbitrary to count really as exercise; overcrowded, so that one’s tiny fragment of claustrophobia begins to swell like a sponge dropped in water; the leader, when you catch a glimpse of her, a middle-aged Anglo lady trying to heat up the room like a Latin temptress; all the wrong people shrieking and having a gay old time, and you ruining everything with a bad attitude you cannot account for. I ran. I pulled weights out of someone’s hands and finished my workout, shivering from the near approach to hell. Outside, though. it was briefly raining, and one blessed that so hard nothing else mattered.

Reading my tome of the Medicis, wondering what causes all the best people, sometimes, to be gathered in the same place.