Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Three distractions

I don't know what to write about this morning. I'm really just looking to distract myself from boredom. And the inner implosions of my thoughts. It is the Fourth of July in my brain. Or my brain is in that little alleyway that was directly behind my first Queens apartment all those years ago replete with arguing couples, crunching ice scraping at 4am, pigeon cooing and one truly classic New York city moment when a woman angrily lifted her bedroom window and said, thickly accented "Hey you! Shut the fuck up!!" I didn't see her but I know she was wearing a shower cap and curlers and a flower print mu-mu. And her husband was behind her on the couch in a wife-beater, the blue glow of the television reflecting off his weathered face as he hunched over a foil wrapped TV dinner. I know all of that happened. Anyway here are three random things:

1) For the past couple of nights I have had elaborate and long dreams involving some heavy symbolism, often bordering on the childishly obvious (I dreamed one night I was getting married but wasn't wearing a dress but rather these old, ratty corduroy trousers). Each night it has been a very different dream but the one thing that has been the same is the way I woke up from them all with this really odd sense of well being. I suppose the only thing that is odd about it is that it is a positive feeling when generally my dreams leave me feeling unsettled or ridiculous or confused. But lately I've been awake and ready to carry on almost immediately. The unsettling occurs later in the day, like right now. My subconscious is doing me a five hour favor every night.

2) Yesterday I spoke briefly to my grandmother in Florida. I was having my lunch break with my mother and she called her up to remind her of a joke they shared a few years ago. My grandmother has somewhat advanced Alzheimer's disease but as a family we were only recently made aware of it. So my mother often calls her in an attempt to jog her memory or even just lighten the mood to distract her from her distractions. So she put my grandmother on speakerphone so we could both talk to her but as with most Alzheimer's patients, my grandmother started going on a long tangent of nonsensical stories. One of them was about walking home from church with my grandfather and seeing a woman be swallowed whole by an alligator. Probably my desire to be able to draw or sketch that story stems from my strong desire to detach myself from how sad it all is but I wanted to see her delusion rendered on paper.
Coincidentally I've been listening to The National quite a bit these last few days and I was just reminded of a lyric from the song "Start a War" that resonates:

 Do you really think you can just put it in a safe 
behind a painting, lock it up and leave?

3) I just finished up reading The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. You can read my paltry review on that site but really all that stayed with me from the novel was this ravenous desire to read a book with a strong female heroine. She doesn't have to be perfect but she has to be the utter opposite of the Hadley Richardson of McLain's invention because good lord that character was pushover. Maybe everyone was a push over for Hemingway but reading this book made me strangely tired of being a woman. I thought about picking up something by Hemingway to read something fiercely masculine (or anything by Chuck Palahniuk) but instead chose a book about a werewolf. My brain is going to take a break from reading about humanity for a bit.

That's all I got today. What's up with you?


1 comment:

  1. Ouch, I'm sorry Paris Wife didn't work out. This book has been wildly popular with book clubs even though it's still in hardcover which kind of tells me it's not the book for me either LOL.

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