the catfish Now that we have good weather, I hardly know what to do. After a winter that forbade stepping out the door, now it's so inviting outside I feel guilty staying inside, then I wonder why and stay indoors anyway. I had an inclination to go outside and clean up some from where the tree was cut down yesterday. But I didn't feel like it. Didn't feel like doing anything. Came inside and went to bed. All I've been able to do today is sit about and lay about. Not interested in anything. Not even interested in laying about the house. Didn't even want to watch a movie or read. Just look out the window at daffodils in one window and meadow with 2 calves in the other.
Yesterday, Mike Love of Whitehead came with his crew of 5 (including him) to cut down a big white pine close to the house that was rotting, dying and close to falling. I thought I'd rather cut it down and control the fall. I'm so out of shape and out of practice chainsawing--it's been 12 years since I've held a chainsaw--I thought a crew would do a better job than I could. And they did. I doubt it took an hour. They set about it and were done. With a tractor, they carried all the leavings across the road to a brush pile I'll burn first day of rain. I came in the house while they worked. I wanted to be helping them, but couldn't. They were so fast and good at what they did, I'd have only been in the way. I didn't want them thinking I was watching them to keep them working. They had plenty of initiative on their own. It was like a white tornado came in, spun around a little bit and was gone. I was happy to pay them. Excellent exchange.
Today I feel like I'm winding down within. I don't know why I feel that way, but it does have a feeling that energy, will, initiative are fading fast and there's nothing I want to do but sleep. The warm weather makes me want to hole up more than cold weather does. I want to do something and I don't want to do anything. But what I want to do hasn't enough urgency about it to shake me into motion. All I want to do is sit around and watch the day go by. So that's what I do. I don't even have the initiative to take a chair outside and sit in the shade. I'm like one of the cats today. Find a place that's warm to lay about and take it easy. The cats know the times of day the sun is right through the 3 windows the sun comes in. I'm like Tapo, going from soft place to soft place, being comfortable throughout the day. I've become one of the cats. There are now 4 of us.
All the fuss I saw yesterday putting sheriff and helicopter and this and that together into a fantasy not even related to the facts, all went away. I take it now the sheriff was on his regular patrol. The guys in the pickups talking were not related to sheriff or helicopter. It was just a sequence of occurrences that put together related to each other looks like a movie. But it turns out they weren't related and had nothing to do with each other. Perception is reality? I wonder. I'm not quite with that 100%. For example, a natural law, like gravity, is a fact, no two ways about it. Reality has a lot of relativity in it. Perception is immediate reality for the perceiver, but for collective perceivers not necessarily so. Like what I was seeing was a drama with the parts all related. Turns out it was no drama at all and the parts were not connected. What kind of reality is that? False reality? Isn't that an oxymoron?
It turns out my favorite movies are often ones that follow no apparent theme, no apparent drama, people connected or disconnected going about their lives doing what they do. Sometimes they intersect with other people's lives, which changes things, depending on circumstances. Books too. Like in a biography, you seldom get a big climax just before the end. I am finding Asian writers don't require life-threatening drama to keep a reader's interest. We like to see other people get killed, but not ourselves. Fortunately, we have such variety now with netflix, that Hollywood making one style of movie does not rule anymore. Before, I was restricted to the cineplexes in nearby towns that are all Hollywood boxoffice movies, formula movies. We have our own independent film makers that need big distributors. HBO is awfully good about giving work to directors independent of the Hollywood formulas. In Hollywood movies everybody is pretty. But that's not how it is out here in the world. Just look around. How many Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies do you see? Thankfully, not many.
My primary objection with Hollywood films is the pretty people never do anything like acting tour de forces. You see other people scrambling and running about, then you get a cameo shot of prettypboy and/or prettygirl. One of the most blatant of this type film making was a fairly low grade film called A Bridge Too Far. Robert Redford, Sean Connery, and a few other prettyboys of the day. Whenever anything was going on, prettyboys were out of sight. Then a cameo comes of Connery looking pretty. The camera holds him a little while, then goes on to some action and then rests on Robert Redford looking pretty, then back to some action, then cameos of the other prettyboys in the film. I tend to prefer films where the people are not pretty, I've not seen any of the actors before and the formulas not so blatant. Not all stories have a happy ending. I prefer art to box office. My sisters and everyone in my extended family prefers box office to art. Where did I come from? A psychic told me Antares, but I don't believe it. Antares is a star, like our sun. Nobody can live on the sun. It's a star in my birth constellation, Taurus. That's as close as it gets.
That psychic experience was funny. My optometrist friend, Jim Rhodes of Jefferson, took me to Charlotte one day to see this psychic he knew. She took an instant disliking to me, which I loved, because I kind of took her for a fraud on sight. She wanted to see my hands. She said, "When I see your hands, all I see is space! I'm not about space. If you want to find out about space, you'll have to go to somebody else." I told her I was here for what she had to say. She settled down a bit and told me stuff she was indignantly judgmental about, and I'm thinking, Of course, she's a preacher. Had her own church and followers stroking her ego, holding her up high. I played the tape of the session to a friend later who knew me well. She said the psychic was a fraud. She didn't say anything that particularly revealing about anything. My friend, who lived in Charlotte, knew of the psychic and the name she had around there. She advised me to pay the woman no mind. I didn't have much inclination to, anyway. Though I have to say, she did say a little bit that was intriguing. I thought it was funny we didn't like each other on sight. That doesn't happen a lot. When it does happen, it tells me I'm in the wrong company.
I missed Jr something dreadful today. It's his mind, his way of thinking that is so different from mine. His mind was refreshingly devoid of abstractions, latinate words, anything outside these mountains, Samuel Beckett, politics beyond the county. I miss the clarity of his thinking and the total honesty of who he was. This doesn't mean he wasn't capable of deceiving. Jr was indeed totally honest about who he was. Possibly it was having the crew from Whitehead cutting down the tree yesterday. One used to work for Jr quite a bit at the sawmill. All knew him all their lives. They were people from his world and his way of thinking. That short visit with these people of Whitehead, all of them knowing Jr, all of them in his way of thinking, brought him back and showed me what it is I continue to miss about Jr after all these months is his way of thinking.
No comments:
Post a Comment