Limbo

Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

Yes, I am ridiculous.

My apologies for not writing lately, and especially for not reading. I've missed you. But I needed to withdraw from the online world... To concentrate fully on the real one? I suppose so. That's as true an excuse as any, however poor an explanation it may be.

There have been times in the past six weeks when I've wanted to withdraw from the real world too.

I feel new and precarious, not writing. Like I'm becoming someone else. It's not a bad feeling. I can easily imagine myself as a person without aspirations to be a writer, a person content with a life unexamined and unexplained. In the past six weeks, except for workorders, estimates, invoices and Christmas cards, I've written practically nothing. On a deposit slip I wrote "Wallace Stegner Spectator Bird" and "Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides" and my brother's new email address. (Does anyone use the deposit slips in their checkbooks for deposits? I think someone must, but I don't know him. Why do they keep printing them? I haven't filled out a deposit slip since, well, maybe never. Although I must've done it at least once in my life.) Thumbing through the recent pages of my B&P journal, I find a recipe for dump cake, a phone number for Bien Nacido Vineyards, and a few scattered lines of thought, undated and unconnected:

"Vultures replete on fenceposts."

"Terrible thing for a member of my generation to admit, but Christmas can't be Christmas until I hear a Christmas carol sung by Robert Goulet."

"I am sitting in my car in a parking lot, watching gold gingko leaves skitter along the black asphalt. Gusts of wind enliven them intermittently, the puddles are thick with them, and the imitation of butterfly life is almost exact. Only the sound is wrong, the dry pitter-patter of brittle leaf edges scraping the macadam."

"A few days before Thanksgiving, the Fiend left me, briefly. Very briefly. In fact, for the exact number of hours it takes to fly from Los Angeles to Baltimore. Then he called me from the BWI airport and told me he had made a mistake."

The last thing I wrote was a quotation from John Champagne's When the Parrot Boy Sings:

"It isn't enough just to want things to be good. There's always something that ends up spoiling the utopia. There's always someone who wants something else."

Tomorrow I hope to come up with a better explanation.

~

I am Fridtjof Nansen. After skiing across Greenland and achieving the farthest North, I become a researcher, doctor and diplomat. I die of old age in Norway. I was portrayed in a movie by Max von Sydow.

Which Edwardian-Era Polar Explorer are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

last eleven: