"You Don't Seem Yourself Today"

I'm a little lost lately.  Everything is familiar in a routinized sense, but strange in every other way.  I haven't been able to sleep the night through this past week waking around four every morning, and I am cognizant that my dreams are boring.  More like thinking than dreaming, really.  Last night it was just about cameras.  I watched a bunch of video reviews of the new Leica Q and liked almost everything.  But the thing I don't like is a killer--the focal length of the fixed lens.  So I thought again about buying the Leica M--either the 240 or the Monochrom or the new 246.  I don't need them, of course.  They are a symptom, not a cure.  After getting up and using the bathroom, I put on music and lay back down.  The music took me away.  I slept, but the dreaming was about people I used to know. . . just remembering.  Work is a dull drag but pays the bills in a way I am enjoying.  Still, the money leaks away on a.c. repairs and mulch.  I found that the wall in my shower has rotted and is soft and must be repaired.  Big job.  I have monstrous trees that need trimming at a monstrous price.  Everything hints at disaster.

I need to get away from this place again.  Summe's are always this way.  I can't sleep.  The heat and humidity foster a paranoid insanity.  Read your Faulkner.  He was a reporter as much as an artist.  It is in those vast southern summers that the atrocities are worst.  Yes, I must get away from the summer atrocity. . . but what about the cat?  Seriously, you will find it stupid, but she keeps my foot nailed to the floor.  I want to go away every weekend, but there is that.

When I think about my life, I wonder how I was once so alive and able to do so much with such aplomb.  History is an anchor that we drag from place to place.  If this had happened instead of that. . . .  I avoid that thinking, of course, but it is there when I "sleep" if sleep it can be called.  There is that and the insanity of the culture in which I live and the increasing population, the growth of technology. . . oh, I will become a Catholic, enter the priesthood, live in rectum or whatever they are called. . . a rectory, I think.

Street portraits are so awfully telling about the human condition.  People rarely look happy.  Nine out of ten images make you feel that everyone is suffering from the same internal sadness and doubt, the same sort of madness as you.  That is what I like about them, the candid shot in which the person is unprepared and stripped of the momentary artifice of a moment.

I want to block others from my consciousness for awhile and concentrate on what I am thinking, feeling, doing.  I will, too.  Gone will be that silly smile we think is a sign of happiness.  People will worry.  "What's wrong," they will say.  "You don't seem yourself."  Oh no, I will say, I am totally myself today.  It is awful, ain't it?