January 12, 2013

Keep receiving notices of people following me on Twitter, which is intriguing as I have never “tweeted.” Maybe it’s some automatic process.

Accidentally went house hunting yesterday. A series of wrong turns, and the knowledge that it was back on the market, sent me back to the “Hobbit House” on Pine Forest that I almost bought two summers ago. I do have an immediate and almost mystical affinity with the land. Waiting for the realtor, I walked through the forest recognizing, identifying, planning. But this second look convinced me that I pretty much hate the house, and would feel suffocated in it. Looked for another property but couldn’t find it. All the better. I think of the repairs desirable on this house, believing they can’t be made while I’m living in it, and that I should therefore vacate, at least for a while. But the upgrades are necessary only if I want to sell. If I don’t want to sell, they becoming irrelevant, because I really don’t care that much.  I wanted to move because this is in no sense my dream house, but neither is this my dream life, and I’m not sure how much of my dream life would depend on the house I dwelt in. Maybe I want to travel as much as I can for as long as I can, and this is a perfectly adequate place to come back to. When all other things have been in order, I have scarcely noticed where I was dwelling.

Found pictures of this house before I moved in. It looked like a suburban home then. My habitation has always resembled a kind of superior dorm room.

Beautiful pale light on everything in the backyard before I turned on the kitchen light. Moonlight? I didn’t really look.

Put on my ancient Cambridge t-shirt yesterday, noting that it is 42 years old. Wearing it again today, to give it as much life as I can endure.

A parable: A dog is tied up in a yard. A cruel boy comes and hits the dog with a stick. Every time the boy hits the dog, the dog howls and snaps and barks. Everyone is disturbed by this. The boy says, “There can be peace when the dog stops howling.” The dog says, “There can be peace when the boy stops hitting me with the stick.”  The boy hits the dog to make the point that the dog COULD refrain from howling if it were determined enough. The dog howls to make no point at all, but because the boy has hit him with the stick. I don’t know if anyone could say that these two perspectives are actually equal. It could all stop in an instant.