On Friday, something remarkable happened: I was never alone. Extraordinary, really. I am usually alone for most of the day, and always for at least part of it. But one thing led to another. Actually, every time somebody left, somebody else showed up.

On Saturday, instead of succumbing to the vapors, I tackled the housekeeping with unusual thoroughness. Aside from a short stack of DVDs, a tall stack of CDs, and the materials that one fine day will be mounted in our wedding scrapbook (just in time for our thirtieth anniversary?), everything lying about the apartment in the morning had found its place by dark.

On Sunday, I had to work. Well, I hadn’t been able to get anything done on Friday! I didn’t mind working yesterday, though. I didn’t feel under pressure to get things done, although I don’t know why that should be.

This Friday, I’ll have my quarterly Remicade infusion. For the first time in ages, I feel that I need it. It may be that my immune system has had nothing to do with the fact that I’ve felt run down for about a week — and, although I’ve felt run down, I haven’t felt the small but sapping aches and pains that characterized life before Remicade. Not yet. And I wasn’t too run down to have a big day on Friday (big for me, anyway) and an industrious one on Saturday. It’s possible that I’ve just been working hard. But I’m disappointed that I won’t be progressing from four infusions per year to three anytime soon. I have no objection to the infusions themselves; ordinarily, I feel no different leaving the hospital than I did walking in. But the infusions are very expensive, and I can’t expect that insurance will always be there to pick up the tab. 

Another dispiriting factor has been the pile of novels that confronts me. I’m not really taken by any of the books in it; I’m afraid that I bought rather promiscuously in the spring. I wanted to be in the swim. Instead: imagine whitewater rafting, but without the water. The novels in my pile have been as difficult to like as it is hard to imagine waterless whitewater.  

I have come to think somewhat better of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, though. I really disliked the first two chapters, and when the subject of the New Coke fiasco came up — the book is set in 1985 — I thought about throwing the book across the room. Now that I’ve almost finished it, I think instead than the author has undertaken this project at least 15 years too soon. Mr Whitehead writes very well — a bit too well at times, if you know what I mean — and he has a sure grip on the agonies of adolescence. But he doesn’t yet know how to make that most horrible stretch of life interesting. (Maybe nobody does.) It’s rather like what Kathleen said of the Francis Bacon show at the Museum — twice as awful up close.

I myself, by the way, find the Bacon twice as interesting, and surprisingly beautiful. But I know better than to venture a discussion of the matter with Kathleen. At least I got her to see it.

Tomorrow, I will be alone all day. What’s extraordinary is that I don’t know anymore how important it is, or even if it is important, to be alone. That is, I don’t have to be alone in order to work. A deeper-thrusting change is hard to imagine. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 11:59 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.