Yesterday, I was blogging about standards and values. I guess that is what I was writing about. It's hard to tell. Sometimes you just have to talk to come to a point. I was just talking. Something was taking shape, but it hadn't quite yet. That's what happens, though. You say something, then you ruminate, and you may change your mind or the thing you were slouching toward begins to take a more decipherable form. There is, or was, an entire philosophy built around the concept that "writing is a process," and that revision is the key. Somehow, in that theory, writing never ends.
I hate that concept.
No doubt, however, that it is difficult to say a thing properly. Unless you are a genius of some sort. That is why someone like Christopher Hitchens is so fascinating. He seems to have crafted his words long before he spoke them.
Onward. Reporting is easier than opining. No, not easier, just less susceptible to sounding foolish.
My bachelor retiree days are coming to an end, first for a few days, then for the rest of my life, I guess. My cousin is leaving for the coast tomorrow and will be gone a few days. I will be living at my mother's house once again. Twenty hour shifts. My cousin will come back, she says, for a few weeks before she heads home. At that point, I am the caregiver again for as long as my mother lives which I am absolutely certain is long than I will. I sat with her all afternoon yesterday. We went to the grocery store. She pushed the cart around and shopped the entire store. This is the same woman who could barely use a walker a month ago. She is a freakshow, a hillbilly phenomenon.
She no longer watches t.v., though, so there is that. She seems to just sit and stare, but I will know more about that tomorrow.
I have had a wonderful time being in my own home, but now I am thinking of all the things I didn't do in my lassitude and laziness, things I will be yearning to do in a few weeks when I am in lockdown. There are places I should have gone. And so I am thinking. When my cousin comes back, I am going to confer with her and my mother and see if it might be alright if I slip out of town for a few days. Truly, it's been years, so long, in fact, it almost scares me. I'm not sure I know how to do that any longer. I will stay in state so that if need be, if something goes wrong, I can get home again in hours. Just to lie by a beachside pool and drink spicy margaritas for a few days, though, or to walk around Miami with a camera, or even further south into the Keys.
But I get ahead of myself. We'll see if it is even a possibility. The Keys seems what might be called "a bridge too far."
* * *
I just deleted a big block of bad writing and bad photographs and now the day is wearing on and I have much to do before I wait on the gas man to show up and look at my meter. 12-5. You know which time he or she will probably come.
I'm tapping out now. I've wrestled with things after the asterisks long enough. Let's end it here.
Without even a song.
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