Start Again - and From Now On

Haven't posted since November of last year. Several posts, and before that it was April of that year.

It's 8:12 a.m. and with the lights off the apartment is dismally dark. Rivulets run down my window and the sky is a thick blanket of grey-white merging with a misty grey Lake. With my long tie die t shirt and jeans on, the scale hit 146 this morning. Even allowing for a crapload of crap still stuck up the colon, and the weight of the clothing, that is still probably 144. The specter of 150 - a number I never thought I could ever reach is just over the horizon of a few more engorgements. Stop! I mean it - really - this time - Stop! Stop...stop.......stop.STOP!

The world is dismal and dank and dark and my life a dismal daily display of sameness....promises unkept, apartment unkempt, work undone.

I have a blog so I must use it.

The rivulets are more insistant now. Plummeting separate drops followed by streaks with long undulating tails racing down the window. Some are competing for space, crossing each other on the way down. There must be a wind, though the trees down in the park seem still - but the water runs at an angle.

There's a certain beauty in the juxtoposition of the still lushly green lawn and green haired trees just north of the flat metal of the bandshell roof, and the melange of orange and rose and dull yellow in the more tousled crowns of the stand of trees just west of the sculpture path.

Yesterday, as I lay on the couch willing myself up and at it (at something - whatever), the sky turned pink as the day rolled in over the lake. That was a day of more promise, if its entrance is indicative of anything other than the happenstance of the temperature and precipitation. I choose to believe that it is. But, then, what did I do yesterday? I worked on the MFA application, and in the process I read old articles, travel pieces, political prognostications, and a cuple of stories, dating back from before year 2000. Some were not bad, some were pretty good, and all of them reminded me of how long I have been promising myself that I will get to it, get at it, start writing, start reading, develop discipline, lay out an even slightly marked though meandering life path.

So today, perhaps there is a dankness that the pushy part of my personality needs to break through. A challenge. Better than the smooth sailing of a pink and clear sky? With the pinkness comes hope and a quiet smile and perhaps a lethargy. With the dark and the wet (and perhaps even some cold) comes a need to do something.

And 146 . If that isn't a challenge! And a horrific sign. A precursor. A future. A failure of hope. An evaporation of my still continuing self image - that interior self of Audrey Hepburn who just requires some discipline to break back out. Those pictures of myself on the refrigerator. That picture not on the frig but still clear in my head of me standing in a large room filled with revelers one evening at Club Med (at the age of forty plus), wearing tight and very short cut off jeans and a little tank top and looking damn good!

So what about today?

Well, I AM writing. Drivel, repetitive drivel, but nevertheless something. And in the blog. At least I HAVE a blog.

And then there is France. I have this insistant hunger in my stomach to be back on a narrow street with cobblestones, to sit at Cafe Panis with a glass of red wine, to talk about le truc and how I am desole' about quelque-chose, and to decide that I want to prendre un verre and apres ca peut etre something simple, and to read Le Monde, and sit on the second floor of Shakespeare & Co. with writers and readers and Lynn or Thirza and to feel a part of an arts community, to be someone with something to say, and the ability to say it with panache and metaphor .

Today is a day of writing drivel, expressing my unhappiness with my lot, and watching, still (now at 8:40) the hypnotizing streaks and drops racing down my window, and the glow of the red blinking light on the land line on which I never check messages, and feeling the accusing eyes behind me of the piles of papers and books on the table and before me on the desk and surrounding me on the book shelf and the floor, and the undone dishes slogging in the sink, and the tightness of my jeans over my stomach, and the filthy feeling in my mouth.

And then, I watch a quiet cat with large round eyes looking at me lovingly from the arm of the couch, and hear the soft movement of another snuggling in the basket on top of my blue and gold flowered cloth bag, and decide to close up this useless blog (till later?) and walk to Starbucks for some coffee, and then get to it................whatever...............get onto something.

It's 8:55. My teeth are clenching and scraping against each other. I realize I am hunched over the computer. Need to move things from the floor so I can wrap my legs around the wheeled table , move it closer to me, and sit up straight. If possible, it appears to have become even darker and more dismal outside and in this room.Only the computer screen and the hall light that I neglected to turn off last night when I dozed off after Greek food.

This day must start.

Now.

(Whatever).