How pleasant it would be if we could average out our sharper feelings. I’d be only too happy to trade in the spikes of ecstasy that thrust me up from time to time for an end to the pits of bad feeling that rather more often yawn beneath me, usually when I’ve got to deal with an unpleasantness from a position of fatigue. My pleasures are increasingly cerebral anyway. My miseries are more emotional than ever.

Which is to say that they fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day, leaving me wondering what all the fuss was about. This morning, it was hard to tell which font of self-pity was weeping more profusely. On the one hand, I was about to undergo a bit of outpatient surgery that might last for hours. On the other, I had to be up and dressed and out of the house at the obscenely early hour of half-past eight. For at least the length of entire Second Avenue block, I developed the economic argument against my own continued existence: I have become too expensive to keep alive. Who benefits from my drawing breath? Raptures of self-abnegating renunciation ground to a halt when an inner voice murmured, “Kathleen.” I had to slog through the remainder of the walk to the dermatologist’s office (all the way down to 69th Street!) without benefit of high-flying remorse. Life can be very hard.

The worst of it was, of course, that I’m such an inconstant bastard. I simply can’t maintain a bad mood. Gentle Reader, you have no idea how much purple prose my awareness of this failing has spared you. It would be one thing if the certainty that I’ll feel better in half an hour had any emotional weight, but of course it doesn’t. It weighs exactly as much as the good advice that’s inflicted upon fifteen year-olds.   

The surgery took no time at all, really, and I did go to the movies after all (Green Zone). Afterward, I went for a shop. I eked out the Hours; I launched a new playlist (sans superstructure — just Mozart’s piano sonatas, Vivaldi’s La Stravaganza, and Thomas Allen singing Brahms). I made a cheddar omelette for Kathleen and a cheeseburger for myself. I read bulks of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. I had a lovely chat with Megan — lovely (at both ends) largely because she is living in a Real Apartment, and I feel her happiness at least 97% as keenly as I should do if it were I, and not she, who had just escaped Château Gizmo. Later, Megan sent some lovely photos of Will via email. Quaint! She didn’t upload them at Facebook, so I didn’t, either. I did print one for Kathleen to look at, though, because of the Defargéène subtext of the shoot (the subject of which is Will’s interest in a stylized tropical fish that Kathleen made a few years ago for a forgotten purpose): Keep Knitting!  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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