This
Journal

November
1999

Free Day. It's a pretty good deal even though it's stuck at the not-quite rear-end of a week. We'll take it. I needed it.

And what did I do with this baroque fountain of time that gurgled up around my toes as I jumped from bed this morning? I ate breakfast. The Wheaties® were crisp. The confused newspaper voices bounced off my canyonesque brain. No time for that clutter - I had journals to read. And read them I did. Done by noon. I got a little (very little) exercise by lugging them over to school. Then back to my room to check the e-mail and the Apple support board.

Apple support? Yes, Mom's having trouble with old Max, the antique Performa 578 she inherited from me when I stepped up to this slick litttle iMac. Max has 36M RAM, but the system is gobbling up 32M so nothing else works very well. I tried to help my sister Beth with it over the phone; and, in between her venomous execrations against the humble Mac, I promised to seek help online. I'd heard such things could be done. So I found the spot, posted my plea, and Bingo! This afternoon I found that two helpful souls had diagnosed the problem and suggested a simple corrective course. With luck, this will solve the problem, but experience teaches that simple first solutions are often ineffective. We will see. It's hard to fix these things long distance.

Then I read a bit, but my brain wasn't working right. Why is that? What was the distraction? None of your business. But when my eyes popped open from a little snooze, I remembered that I had no fresh clothes for school tomorrow, so I lugged it all down to the laundry room. Wandered back up to attempt Birkerts' essay on Keats' "beautiful" To Autumn. He clearly thinks this is one of the greatest poems. First stanza of three (without proper indentation):

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

One warm sentence. I bet you skipped it. People don't like to read much poetry these days. And they don't much like to get bushwhacked by it in the middle of a perfectly ordinary journal entry. But there you have it. No apologies. I don't get to do Keats in class because he's British, but I sorely miss his wild sweet stuff. You'd never guess to look at me, but I've got some seriously unreconstructed Romantic genes chugging around in here. Do we blame the Irish or the Italians? Or do we blame Bob Dylan?

Hey. I just looked at that stanza again. I don't think it's even a complete sentence. I boil it down to something like "Season and bosom-friend conspiring how to load, to bend and fill, to swell and plump, to set..." Where's the predicate? "Conspiring" is present participle, a modifier. But so what? It still manages to speak, to sing, more richly than any of my more fully constructed sentences. Technically, nothing is happening; it's a static portrait - but that's not the effect, thanks to all those infinitives. I wonder if Birkerts sees this. I'll have to read on.

Over dinner tonight (chicken enchiladas, rice-aroni, corn, salad, coffee) we ended up trading gross vermin stories and laughing. Funny encounters with mice, rats, cats, cockroaches, and big fuzzy spiders. Too bad you missed it.

When I first heard Elvis's voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was gonna be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.
Bob Dylan