A QUESTION FROM ABOVE

Walking home; post a particularly Scottish day of gloom.

The clouds either retreating after their day of control, or mounting in preparation for another assault.

How could such a glowing sky make me so happy?

 

RECENT ADOPTIONS

And we just adopted two knit monkeys. Silly grin continues...

 

TIME TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX[OR A DISCUSSION OF BEING CLICHÉ]

I feel so cliché. I should probably, to be grammatically precise, write that I feel like such a cliché, but that seems insufficient at the moment. Thus, I feel cliché.

You may ask, dear reader, why? Why such a sensation? This may perhaps seem an unusual sentiment here on these electronic pages, at least from your experiences in the past. Perhaps my past angst has verged on the ordinary, my concerns a mite traditional, but cliché I should hope not.

Nonetheless, there it is. You see, I don't really know what to write about; haven't for the past week or so. Do you know why? I am happy, content, pleased; everything is good. That is why I feel so cliché. It seems unforgivable to be unable to write from this position. It goes against everything I have worked so hard for as an artist, confirms all the stereotypes I have railed against. Must I lop off an ear in order to provide myself some grief, thus prompting the words that do not wish to come?

Obviously I shan't do that; extremes are unnecessary, and extremities are rather important. But I still feel ridiculous. Unless, of course, I can find a way of making work about skipping about gleefully and having a ludicrous grin on my face. Granted it is a lovely face, but I doubt MOMA shall come calling for a photo of it in the next several days.

Of course this is not such a big deal; that is what fiction is for. It is not like I am not accustomed to complete fabrications in my work. I don't particularly believe in strict autobiography, but there is usually at least a seed from somewhere in my reality. What's the germ of an idea in this goofy smile that just keeps spreading across my face?

Ah, we should all have such problems. I have to imagine that sometime between now and tenure-time I will have a whole truckload of new ideas. If you had ever been inside the whorling mess that is my head, you, too, would probably assume new projects would pop up at any time, but at the moment: nothing, followed by another goofy grin.

So, for now I should probably go sit in front of a mirror and enjoy the lack of unremitting anxiety.

 

AN UPDATE REGARDING MY WORLD AS THOUGH WRITTEN BY TARZAN

Me.

Job.

Tenure-Track.

Near Home.

Good.

Huzzah!

[More about this and the world and the light in E________ and the Holidays celebrations in the city and whisky after a while. For now... a bit of rest after many thousands of miles of travel.]

A FEW THINGS FROM BUDAPEST

Well, dear reader, I am back from Budapest. You may be asking yourself at the moment: Budapest? I thought he was in E________. Well, I am, but I was in Budapest. The wife and I spent five days behind the old Iron Curtain.

There is ever so much I could say about the trip, and probably will eventually. But, for the moment, time is a wee bit tight, so I shall have to be brief. Hence, as is my wont, I shall begin with signage. Don't complain, dear reader, you should be used to it by now.

A quick note about Hungarian signage, though. While there are many similarities to what I am used to here in the Western Europe, as well as back in the States, there were some wonderful, disturbing, and subtle differences that made me very happy. For the most part I shall leave them for you to discover, but I shall pause from my currently hectic schedule to pass on a few of my favorite points.

1] I love the upside-down pointing hand.

2] One really ought not drink jug-wine on the Metro, or at least so says the sign.

3] I want the puppy that the man is carrying.

4] The subways announcement tones on the Yellow Line are perhaps my favorite thing in all of Budapest. I am pretty sure that I burst out laughing – much to the amusement of fellow passengers – every time I heard them.

5] I think all the anonymous signage people in the States ought to wear hats like the bicycling men in Budapest.

Those things mentioned, I leave you to a small selection of my favorite signs, sounds, and bits of graffiti from Budapest.

 

TOMORROW I AM TIRED

Tonight I am tired. Actually, I suppose it is morning now, so I shall revise. Tomorrow I am tired.

I know, dear reader, you are about to complain of my grammatical indecency there, my mixing of tense or whatnot, but believe me; I can tell. It is one of those nights that will inevitably continue into the wee hours of morning, lingering on through the rest of the day despite whatever efforts may be put forward.

I know these nights well enough at this point in my life that I am quite aware that forcing sleep is futile. If it will have me, it will come, otherwise there are always things to do.

I also know, am quite sure, that tomorrow I am tired. These nights, which used to be the cornerstone of both my academic and social lives back in the days of my youth with my vim and my vigour and my long-flowing mane of hair. They came two, three in a row, piece of cake, not a problem. Heck, that was what kept me going; sleep deprivation became its own little drug bringing along little endorphin rushes at the extremity of my fatigue. But this, dear reader, is now. The little pumps that pushed those hormones seem to have grown weak, or perhaps have taken a vacation from my aging body. Who knows?

It isn't that I don't want to sleep; of course I do. I am here in E________ with the lovely wife in the bedroom, safe, warm, comforting. But here I am with you, or rather with myself using you as a surrogate for talking to myself as the minutes tick by on the clock over there.

I don't know why I am awake, or to be more precise, why I cannot go to sleep. I am awake precisely because I can't sleep, but that still leaves me with why. I do not feel particularly anxious – no more than the usual baseline. I do not have any great problems looming over me. As odd as it may seem to hear this from me, but the world is good at the moment.

So, here I sit tonight, as it grows later and later. My brain remains in that same oddly humming fuzz it was in a couple of hours ago. I neither grow more tired, nor more awake. I simply jitter here in this odd state of in between: slightly droopy, slightly twitchy. At least I can be pretty sure that this shan't last for the days on end it used to, that tomorrow night I will gladly curl up in bed with a book and a duvet, the wife beside me, and I will sleep. Tomorrow night there will be cherubic slumber.

But tonight I cannot sleep. Therefore, I know, tomorrow I am tired.

 

ADDICTION ADDENDUM

Remember, dear reader, the image I posted a few days ago. You know, that bit of signage I sent in to The Times Online. Well, that bit of signage, the one demanding that all children remain downtrodden, is a finalist in the Sign of The Times contest.

Thus, dear reader, you should go there and vote for said image. It is not that I will gain anything from it; it is simply a matter of feeding my addiction.

Feed Me!

Feed Me!

 

GREY

I grow fond of grey. Not so much the color, but the sky, as a balm to the ever-decreasing ascension of the sun. Yes, that dense cover of clouds overhead today that dilutes the increasingly feeble sun, but also diffuses it, sets it glow into every corner of the firmament. More importantly it obscures just how low the sun's – perhaps overly ambitiously termed – rise is now. The grey masques the sun's meagre height in its shroud of uniformity. One need not look sideways to find the sun on days like today; it is enough to know that it is up there, somewhere, hidden, that the sky is grey.



I know the grey of winter will be oppressive, like a blanket too heavy to kick off, but this grey is not that. Not yet. It filters out the low-looming light, hiding from me the suns impending scarcity. This grey is a comfort, a shelter. It does not foreshadow storms, great deluges of rain, torrents of wind; it simply veils the sky, or perhaps it my eyes that are veiled.

I grow fond of grey, though I know soon I will bemoan it. But today it is grey, so I dance.