Dear Diary: Progress
Another reading day? That’s what I wanted when I got up. So much for last week’s feeling that I was really living in the rhythm of my new assignments. Work wasn’t effortless, exactly, but work was the only effort. There was none of the much more common effort of worrying about working. I was getting somewhere! But that was last week.
What I wanted, of course, wasn’t a reading day. What I wanted was a check-out day. This is what depression is like for me, when it hits. I want to have nothing more to do with the world, at least of a transactional nature. Today, I wanted very much to have nothing to do with the lady in charge of the building’s office, but there was no way round it. I had to tell her that I was expected a mover tomorrow. That was really all that I had to do, but I knew that there would be complications, if not outright trouble. When I told the lady in charge that I was expecting a mover tomorrow, she said that she hadn’t heard anything about it. What she meant (since of course she was only just now hearing about it from me) was that she hadn’t received a certificate of insurance from the mover. No matter what I said, she repeated that I would have to arrange for the certificate of insurance, or the mover would not be allowed to set foot in the building. As I expected, she took a palpable pleasure in repeating this condition. If not, then not. It was making her day. Not that I was helping.  Having expected the encounter to go badly, I did what I could to assure that it did go badly.
It didn’t go that badly — nothing happened that a nice call from LXIV couldn’t smooth over. (The energetic and resourceful LXIV has been helping us out with some refurbishment projects, and now, a year after the bolt of fabric took up its post by the front door, we’re sending a love seat out to be reupholstered.) The mover, it turned out, had already submitted the certificate of insurance (can you believe how boring this is!), but the lady in the office hadn’t got round to checking her fax machine. (A capable and helpful adminstrator would have thought to check that detail, instead of idiotically repeating the need for me to contact the mover, but this woman wouldn’t have done such a thing for the likes of me if there were a million dollars in it for her. Of the same age and, if I may presume, both more or less Irish, we are born enemies. It is that simple. Each one of us is dead certain that the other is a useless sack of water.) I was so rattled by the sour aftertaste of this inescapable enmity that I couldn’t do anything when I got back to the apartment.
My mother (and more than a few friends) would have said: what a big baby you are! I can understand that I might look infantile, or, at any rate, deeply chickenshit; I avoid encounters with certain kinds of people with panicky rigor. But I don’t shrink from such people because I’m afraid of them. It’s rather that they make me fear myself. The desire to visit physical mayhem on dull-witted bureaucrats who aren’t well-paid enough to (a) have a brain or (b) give a damn frequently threatens overwhelms me. They say that you have to put up with such people in the world, but I, for one, would like to know the reasoning behind that proposition. I say — but we’ll draw a veil over what I say. Â
I hope you realize how mortified I am to confess such high-strung ricochets. This is supposed to be the Web log of a civilized humanist, but for an hour today my soul could not decide between homicide and suicide.
In the end, I did sit down and write up this week’s book — and then I went to the movies. In view of tomorrow’s Chinese fire drill, I thought that I’d better get this week’s movie-going out of the way. And while I was at the movies, Kathleen was on a train, chugging home from Washington, where she spent an exciting couple of days that I’ll ramble on about anon, hopefully with the aid of a link to the Wall Street Journal.
Yesterday, as I noted, I was burnt out. Today, I was intemperate. That’s progress for you.