Downtown

 

October 8, 2020

Wearing actual tailored men’s pants for the first time, I think, since March 13. They’re pretty loose, too. While most have gained weight during isolation, I have apparently lost it. Doing nothing & eating nothing balanced a little in my favor.

Anxiety about Covid made me cancel plans to go to Ohio. The threat seems to be tightening, though people treat it more and more cavalierly. If all those in the Republican inner circle who have, through their own belligerence and childishness, contracted the disease become at least temporarily incapacitated, we might get through this year with a shred of dignity. 

Went downtown for a haircut. Walked about in the autumn light. Masks were general and ungrudging. I had wine all by myself at a street side café, some tongue-burning Mexican sandwich at the place where the exquisite TABLE used to be. The lady wanted to explain all the exotic dishes to me, but she did so in Spanish, which is why I ended up with the flamethrower sandwich. Almost inexpressibly exhausted 

Louise Gluck receives the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s not that one didn’t see it coming, but that one lives in hope that, sometimes, the worst thing one imagines does not come to pass. All part of the spiraling disaster that is 2020. Gluck and I have met or read together several times. The first time was at Warren Wilson. She was beautiful and dramatic then, like a witch in a TV romance, and you knew that the manifest badness of her work was going to be set aside because she LOOKED like someone who ought to be a poet. Her destiny set, her actual achievement from that point onward was going to be irrelevant. Her poetry was not merely lacking, but bad to the point of parody—which Tom and I did during the drive home, turning the mundane things visible through the car windows into poetry is fully Gluckian as her own. We were making the point that the work is all tone and no substance, and that even the tone has to be laboriously and externally applied but those who trust the effort is worth it. You say the lines as if they meant something, even though they don’t. We are like people in community theater, standing and hollering for bad performances because we have, somehow, invested in them. Or, from another angle, it’s quite Trumpian: a man who provably failed at everything he tried is still passed on as a paragon of some sort until he sits in the White House. Luckily, Gluck can go very little material damage from the eminence to which she has been sadly and predictably raised. It makes me sad for poetry, though, when bad and good are tossed together in one rancid bin as though there no difference between them. Only people indifferent to poetry could make Louise Gluck a Nobel laureate. 

 

October 7, 2020

Various duties throughout the day. One’s definition of “busy” changes at times like these. Having to be in a certain place at a certain time once during the day is an imposition. Coffee with Alan, who may end up sharing my riverside space.  He had the inside track on gossip of which I knew only the periphery. He hates Miss Jill as much as I do, and with more information to build the hatred upon. Skipped the vice-presidential debate. The fragments I heard of it this morning on the radio make that seem the right choice.

 

October 6, 2020

Before dawn trip for service at the Toyota dealership. I started a play about Artemisia Gentileschi on the covered patio while waiting. That taking 15 minutes, I headed off into the mountains, where I parked at Walnut Cover and entered the forest, moving north. All things being equal, I typically head north. Gold-green, wondrously silent forest. The sun broke again and again out of the cover of fog. Even a slight hill debilitates me, and so I must resolve to walk alone, or walk with someone wondrous patient. Dug and gardened when I came home, finishing off the “baby-blue-eyes,” a million seeds of which I bought without really knowing what they are. 

 

October 5, 2020

Note from the Board of Elections that my ballot was accepted. 

Gene at Moonshine Cove tweaks me to get my publication materials in.  Truth was, I never expected it to happen, and now that it is, I run to catch up. What on earth cover would a book like that have? Helpless now that I don’t have a studio. 

 

October 4, 2020

Amazingly vivid erotic dream. I moved to Warsaw to complete some project, and that man in the next apartment was a boxer. We’d say hi at first, and then have a beer together in the evening. He explained in broken English (better than my dream Polish) that his trainer was anxious for him to stay home at night during training, and not put himself in danger at the bars, so would I be willing to have sex with him? I said yes (he was blond, compact, very muscular, beautiful in a way I somehow attach to Eastern Europeans). This worked out well for both of us, and soon his trainer came to thank me for keeping his boy off the street. We all got along, so it became a three-way. The trainer looked a little like a vampire, but that was OK.  Even in the dream I wondered if I were dreaming or writing a short story.

Finishing off a patch of garden, I looked down, and the ground heaved as if some big animal were under it, pushing out, changing its mind, subsiding. Decided not to probe.

Sleepy Gap and Elsewhere

 

October 3, 2020

Hard to justify having no time to record a journal when there should be nothing but time. Moving forward steadily, but not speedily, on two manuscripts, as unrelated as it is possible to imagine. Applying myself nobly to gardening, digging new beds, yanking old ones out of their armories of weed. Bought most of the dirt I’ll need till spring. Yesterday I planted iris and crocus and spring beauty and blue anemone. 

Trying to live up to the expectations of my step-counter. Half the recommended number– about 4400 steps– is pretty much what comes naturally in a fairly active day, though I have taken to strolling the greenways by the river to raise the number a little. This is excellent, considering the extreme physical inertia of the first part of my quarantine. Today I drove to Sleepy Gap to hike on one of my most familiar trails. It being a sunny Saturday of almost unbelievable sweetness and clemency, even the Parkway had traffic jams. Ran into people and their dogs at the opening of the trail, but deeper in came the solitude and almost disturbing silence of the mountain. The paucity of wildlife often disturbs me there, until I consider that on the trail one is nearly at the top of rugged mountains, and all the sensible creatures will be far below, at the deep woods and the creeks. Even after all that I’m only at 58%–5009 steps. Big handsome man ran past me in both directions, going and returning. Admired that he had enough wind to speak to me. Wind is exactly my issue. Wind has always been my issue. From the first time I remember exertion at all–running as a kid– I knew that my lungs shut down long before anyone else’s. Age has not improved that. I do find that there is a plateau, and if I can make it for a certain period of time, gardening or walking–it gets no worse, and even settles back and becomes a little easier. Such it was at the beginning, and evidently will be at the end. I have made a career out of not mentioning this. 

AW interviews me for the GLBTQ archives. I was deep into it at one time, one of the foundations for a while. I wonder who else remember that? 

I do not watch the presidential debates. I understand that neither old man covered himself in glory. The hell-hound’s covering himself again and again in blood and shit seems to make no difference to his ignorant base.

 The hell-hound has contracted Covid, and with him a host of White House personnel and Republican senators–including our own Tom Tillis. So large a slice of karma–all of them virus-deniers and ostentatiously mask-less at rallies– would be implausible in fiction. Everyone is careful to keep the schadenfreude in check, though some of us are surely asking ourselves the question, WHOSE DEATH WOULD MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE? 

Hiking was replaced by painting at one point in my life. One has just so much leisure time, and must choose where to spend it. Painting is gone now, at least for the moment, so maybe the wildwood comes back. I remember noting in those long ago years that I would go into the woods and immediately submerge into a revery of fury, recrimination, debate with God. Sometimes I saw nothing. Today I noted that I was happy, the whole way. No ancient arguments. No blasts against present resentments. The hymn “Immortal, Invisible” played in my ears for a while, I think in response to the rhythm my feet were keeping on the trail. All in all retirement–if that is what is to be thanked–has been congenial to me.  I have wasted hours of it, but not days. 

 

September 29, 2020

Pounding of rain on the roof. 

Bought a pumpkin from Grace Church. Played with a puppy.

Listening to the President trying to lie his way out of his lies. Hope I live long enough to see how the future will regard all this mess. Aaron Burr, Benedict Arnold, Roger Taney, Warren Harding fade to insignificance as examples of bad behavior. They were at least somewhat specific in their malfeasance.  One can scarcely name an activity or office not soiled by the present horror.

I should report the adventures I invent for my characters as true events of my own life. Would make me sound a lot more interesting.