My wife and son went out of town last weekend, leaving me ample time to read. On Sunday that is absolutely all I did. I also baked cookies. But mostly I sat and read. No housework, no exercise, just sitting and reading. And drinking. And other things. No Super Bowl for me, thanks, I have homework.
There is this feeling I have, maybe I got it from my mom, that if I narrowly make assignment deadlines that I have failed. Note, I said if I narrowly make thm, not miss them. I have succeeded in my task. But there’s a voice in my head which tells me that if I had better managed my time, I could have turned in my assignment earlier.
Who cares? I wrote them, I reviewed them, I edited them, I turned them in. Not rushed, not half-assed, just you know, a half-hour before they are due. Fuck that voice in my head.
It is remarkable to me how classes overlap, as we read a book of poems about the Holoaust for the class I am assisting, and also discuss survivor stories in my illness narrative class. My mind races from subject to subject, they do not interrupt, they flow together.
And suddenly, I need my notebooks, the ones I have been burning. I have not yet disposed of those from October 2019 through February 2020. Five notebooks from that time. I wrote a lot. I wonder what is in them. A lot of unreadable scribbling, to be sure, and short play drafts. But perhaps insight into what happened and when it happened. Potential source material for a chaos narrative.
I know I have my notes somewhere, too. Pulling over on a two lane highway in Wayne County to speak to a dispassionate doctor. The confusion. The helplessness. Maybe.
Wednesday would have been my mother’s 87th birthday. That would have been a fine age to be.
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