Drifting

In the bathroom, performing the morning ablutions, I grip the safety bar in front of the counter, swaying slightly.  This is the danger zone.  Bathrooms were designed for falling, and they have a gravitas about them, a matter of tile and porcelain and hardness.  They are designed to break humans.  Human bones, at least.  This is where the rubber meets the road, the femur meets the floor, and all orthopedic hell can break loose.  The question is, why am I swaying?  Morning fatigue could explain part of this.  Age another.  But I sense a different factor, the ebbing and flowing of life energy, vis-à-vis joy and depression.  Both come at me on an irregular basis, although the latter is more reliable.  Never mind.  There are definite upswings.

Take the local chamber music festival.  A friend and I wandered over to a magnificent evening of Bach and Mozart and Mendelson, not to mention the Menlo Park citizenry.  The music erupted in the most stunning ways, there being something mysterious about the quality of live sound made by live humans and shared by live listeners.  

This matter of what is live and dead is a tricky one these days.  Sometimes I consider myself dead, for reasons that are unclear.  It seems like a simple fact of looking into the future.  Near term or long term.  This must be the most essential, even banal, of human experiences, coming to grips with the finite nature of it all.  And I would think that early participation in gunfire and street violence would give me a head start in this arena.  But apparently not.  And this, or something like it, is what has me swaying before the bathroom mirror.

What gets us by.  Both statement and question.  What gets us by?  With Lorna, my morning helper, having absconded most irresponsibly with her husband to their so-called vacation cabin for an entire week, I am left rather high and dry in the sock-putting-on department these mornings.  Something defiant in me believes that one should carry on, keep up standards, even appearances.  Like a good British colonial governor who gets into black-tie
evening dress to sit down to his tropical dinner.  Which is madness.  Which is why the sensible quadriplegic goes to sleep with socks on, gets up leaves the socks on as he dresses for his day.  Is this disgusting?  Only in the eye of the beholder.  Think of them as perma-socks.  They will have a two-day life.  Their overall life will, by dint of reduced laundering, be extended.  Yes, socks have a life and a right to life on my feet.  With dressing speeded in this fashion, I am up on my feet, whatever their condition, in minutes.

Where are we?  Oh, yes, getting by.  Several of the chamber series' constituents told me about the promising debut of the local Performing Arts Center.  And there it was, joy and depression, meaning and meaninglessness, in one portentous phrase.  Only someone well down the road to eccentricity, and currently in a grief-distorted reality, would flinch.  But I do.  At 487 seats, the thing is a civic theater.  The Menlo-Atherton Civic Theatre, or, better, the Menlo-Atherton Theater, would do nicely for a name.  But my countrymen have a penchant for name inflation.  Which is allied with arts inflation.  And the result does not look promising.  Think of the Wild West with the likes of the Deadwood Opera House rising anywhere people had two gold nuggets to rub together.  Aspirations are splendid.  It does not logically follow that if you build the Cochise Concert Center the Cactus Continuo will just materialize.  Sober up, I say.  I just didn't say it to anyone last night.  Being poised on the knife edge of meaning and meaninglessness, the upbeat and the downbeat, at all times.

I am traveling a lot these days.  Rattling like a pit in an apricot.  Seeds in a gourd.  I feel that the courageous thing is to sit still.  But feelings have a way of piling up on me.  And this subtly panicky suffocation gets me up and going.  Nowhere particular, but going.  The Flying Dutchman.  The Flying Cripman.  If it's aimless, it's also effortless.  I'm drifting with the current.  At least there is one.