June 21, 2019

Flawless, brilliant day. Summer. It feels cool, but while I was weeding I felt the sun warm me like a crocodile on a riverbank.

Watched for my woodchuck. I think the exterminator did his work. I wish I could think of a word other than “exterminator.”

Did terribly at rehearsal last night, unable to sing correctly even pieces I thought I knew. I’m not actually having a good time with this.

Two days in a row at the Y. Smiled at Nat. It is time to observe–hopefully without tempting the gods–that I seem to have in large part recovered from whatever was ailing me for several years. My response to exertion feels “normal” to me, given my age, and my often surprising bodily strength seems to have returned. A session on the cross-trainer or in the garden does not make me lightheaded. At the moment I’m thanking the radicalization of my diet. Near-constant inflammation and ache have shrunk back to the point where I may take no more than two aspirin in a week. I can get up off the sofa in one try. I can sit through (or sit and stand through) a church service without wishing to die. The muscle spasms that I thought a permanent part of my life have gone. I put them down to dehydration (and drinking eased them) but I, if anything, drink less, and do not have to rise three times at the end of night for monumental bladder draining. I still don’t know what it was. Part was anemia, of course, but that was probably more symptom than the central issue. Postmortems are not necessary to me. If it’s gone it’s well gone and I will not poke around in the ashes. Except to keep it from appearing again.  Ten years of acid reflux just disappeared one morning. This seems like that. One cycles through. One moves on. Only edema and the resulting infections have proven immortal.

Notice from Black Mountain Press about the imminent appearance of Night, Sleep. Will believe it when I see it.

Woke in turmoil over Jill and Wiebke and their little tyrannies. I wonder how the prophets of old decided what was a personal irk and what God wished them to blast from the mountaintop. Their opposition to freedom of thought and expression is important enough to fight, but am I the one to fight it, or merely one example of why the battle is necessary? Can wait a little longer to find out.

Orange in my garden.