After all that travel, as the days get short, my days are not sharply defined – my body seems a bit off to me: as though my liver, my body's processing systems, are slightly out of whack. Some work gets done, fragmentarily: I am in focus for an hour or less, then tired for an afternoon, sometimes strangely exhausted and nauseous for a few hours, then sleepy for an evening...
and television seems atrociously stupid, plus a braying, dismaying cloud of Christmas advertisements. Somehow merchandising seems especially desperate and nonsensical this year: as though the multinational corporations, fearful of general disintegration, can only demand with increasing shrillness that we buy things from now until the twenty-fifth.
I'm afraid I won't help them out much – I'll probably buy only contributions to Oxfam for my family. That isn't as dull and stingy as it might seem – it's too complicated to mail them anything really interesting, and of course my family doesn't for the most part need things bought for them.
Feeling a bit faded, intermittently a bit ill, takes the edge off all my ambitions: presentations, applications, even a performance coming up on my birthday. If I were of some aristocratic, non-working background; or alternatively if, years ago, I had chosen to go on disability in some way; I would probably now be quietly, gratefully, not doing much of anything for a few weeks. It is strangely easy to imagine – easier than it usually is, in fact.
But there are flurries of snow; and occasionally a sentence is better-written than it was; occasionally a paragraph actually makes an interesting point. And that makes the day worthwhile.
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