December 22, 2021

In the dark of the darkest night–almost, in fact, at the stroke of midnight-- two bears were on my porch. They’re so silent I wouldn’t have known had I not been looking out the window at the hard moonlight at exactly that second. They’re two of Ruth Bader Ginsbear’s cubs from this year, big, hungry teenagers, funny to watch. The corn I left out for the birds didn’t interest them much. They checked to see if I’d restored the birdfeeder they disembowled at their last visit. I had not. They didn’t get the suet box, which is as high as I can reach, and higher than they can.  I am glad they have each other. Private marauding must lack the crucial element of shared experience. I took them for omens of the night, and their behavior, being playful, a good sign for times to come. 

Past day of anger at an agent’s flip rejection of Jason. “I was not as excited by the opening pages as I anted to be.” Wanted to slap her stupid face. But, early this morning, sat down and wrote a far better opening page, a whoring opening page designed to catch attention rather than to begin the story, but that’s the way it is. 

When I was walking the woods around Lake Powhatan, I realized my inner voices had become tangled, superabundant, nasty. I stopped on the path and bade them Silence! Relief came to my heart almost instantly. The forest had voices that only in my silence could penetrate. The blessed silence held for a few seconds before I realized “I am working hard on being silent before the voices of the sky,” which was itself a voice of distraction, if a purely descriptive one. This is the task for the coming year: achieving emptiness without congratulating myself on emptiness, listening without singing inside “see me listening!” My approach to all things is narration; this will be difficult. 

Again, inconceivably, the Internet is out. My rage is comic. How may different ways can AT&T be consigned to hell? Had to drive out and park on some street to call Spectrum and sign up for their service, as my phone was out too, for reasons not entirely clear.  Two hours of run-around from nice people with Indian accents on whom I could not release the full force of my fury. The AT&T “supervisor,” to whom I’d demanded to speak, left me a phone number which connected to the J.P Morgan/Chase personnel office, which offered me (electronically) a job application. Trying to think of Kentucky, trying to think of Yemen, places where my little inconveniences look like the head of a pin. Even rage over the head of a pin sometimes cannot be avoided. Playing de la Rue and Obrecht on the DVD player in the living room.