The weather is beautiful, the past three days. Clear, sunny – not at all hot of course, it's barely 70 or so, but ideal. For the locals they think this is hot – one said to me yesterday that it was tropical: I just rolled my eyes and said, no, this is not tropical. It's like a pleasant April day in Virginia, or in San Francisco, or like a day in Los Angeles anywhere from March to May, September to November; life should therefore be ideal, as this is in fact the kind of weather I have missed for years, wanted to return to, in a prelapsarian Californication of the imagination.
Unfortunately, I'm not having quite the right response – or having only a pallid version of that response: hope, confidence, the aim to live, to grow, to move. Last night a key broke on my Powerbook; my reaction was surprisingly dark – the sense of things broken, of small things cracked and not working: the television program's digital freezes, my unhealing psoriasis despite the warmer weather, dust on the books, gnats in the houseplants, a headache for no apparent reason....
Becoming aware of that interpretation, of my life as a mess too damaged to be worth repairing, resulted in strange shifts and sea-changes, waves of interpretation and perception that seemed to shift as I slept or woke. I know that my life is cocooned, indulged, easy – but also relatively inert, directionless, dulled – interpreting one way or another is purely a matter of suspended virtual images, of the labels and names for things rather than the things themselves –
what glue, what small clamps and toothpicks, would repair these small, broken things?...
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