Everything, every problem these days, seems to come down to bad timing. Not catastrophically bad timing, just a kind of inconvenience that we might call “incoincidence”: things don’t mesh, they’re out of joint. Weather is a huge factor behind bad timing. Who wants to go outside in a downpour, or on an icy day? Freedom is also a factor. The more you’re in charge of your own schedule, the tighter the pinch of interruptions and distractions. Age is the biggest factor of them all: I don’t have a lot of time, and it takes me longer to do almost everything aside from reading and writing. There is also the bleak side effect of age: doctors’ appointments. The only way to take the “bad timing” out of a visit to the doctor is build the entire day around it. Fun stuff!

I’m hoping that the bad-timing situation in which I find myself today owes to a less recursive matter — I really do; and yet it’s something that I write about endlessly. I need only say the word “closet,” and every regular reader will know what’s coming. The latest episode began when we took down the Christmas tree and wrapped up the ornaments and had no place to put them. This followed hard on the disorderly aftermath of my birthday party. I seem to have two characteristic modes of response to messy disruptions. Either I prioritize the restoration of orderly appearances, which leads to closets choked with mysterious bags of stuff, or I don’t, because I’m too much aware that it’s those bags of stuff that gum up the works. The second option is the path of true virtue, because life is simple only to the extent that cabinets and closets are stocked with what’s needed and nothing else. But it necessarily entails living in disorder while you figure out how to make your closets as accessible as your rooms are presentable.

During our first years in New York, Kathleen and I simply didn’t own a lot of stuff. By the time my father died, and I came into a lot of furniture, we had accumulated numerous boxes of whatnot. We took care of all that by buying a house in the country which, by the time we sold it twelve years later, was totally packed. The third phase involved a storage unit that we are beginning to decommission, as it were. because our Rent Stabilization bonanza, er, evaporated (as we’d known it would), and we can no longer fold the unit’s cost into the idea of a reasonable rent. So here we are, back where we began — in the same apartment, but without any lumber room. It is no longer feasible to say, “I’ll deal with it later.”

(Show don’t tell: yesterday, I pulled out two shopping bags of Amazon receipts. They go back to the beginning of the century, when I did not yet have the habit of copying the receipts into Quicken, making the personal finance program serve as a record of library (and video) purchases. A case can be made for “moving forward” by hurling the shopping bags and their contents down the garbage chute. The opposite case is obviously more compelling, because it occupies the high moral ground of achievement: my inner bureaucrat glows at the thought of a more complete record. But he, this bureaucrat, has a hard time finding interns to do the grunt work — don’t look at me!)

But instead of dealing with it now, I’ve got to go to the dermatologist, who scared me to death last week with biopsy results that showed the recurrence, in a spot on my chest, of a basal cell sarcoma. We agreed that trying to burn it out was preferable, at this point, to inpatient surgery. When I say “scared me to death,” I mean that I could brook no delay, although it probably wouldn’t make much difference if I had the treatment next week. I made the appointment right before our trip to Cincinnati, and also before settling down to the challenge of domestic rectification. I confirmed the appointment on Monday, after several hours of very encouraging session with the hall closet. I’d be up for it now if I hadn’t gone to the movies yesterday instead of continuing with the good work.

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I’m not saying that I’m good for nothing after seeing a movie. That’s not true at all. But a tremendously exciting movie such as Zero Dark Thirty tends to exhaust my frontal cortex, leaving me incapable of making difficult decisions, such as what to do with two bags of Amazon receipts. So I retreated to my reading chair with my Kindle Paperwhite and gobbled up the rest of Barbara Vine’s new book, The Child’s Child. Instead of fixing pork chops for dinner, we ordered in Chinese. “Sounds like you’ve had a good day to me,” said Kathleen. But that’s just what it wasn’t: it was a lazy day. I enjoyed it, yes; but it was not good.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013 at 10:56 am.