A Bit Manic

Fleeting thoughts buzz in and out of my head, never alighting. They are like hummingbirds glimpsed from the corner of the eye: there and gone. Too many moments of too many years occupy bits of my brain, and too many of them refuse to stay in their assigned spots. Here comes a brief glimpse of the honeysuckle clinging to the hillside above the road I took home from school. It is quickly followed by a theater aisle, a neon sign flashing "Hotel, Hotel, Hotel," and then the smell of diesel exhaust mingling with the smell of hamburgers blown through the vent of a diner. A swing stirred by the breeze creaks in a deserted park, a newspaper slaps against the worn boards of a porch, a cat sitting on a table in a courtyard cafe grooms itself as a parrot squawks from a perch in a nearby tree. Not one image will settle long enough for me to focus on it. Heat flows quickly after cold, day changes places with night again and again as mere minutes pass, the real (or once real) blends with the imagined. If one's whole life does pass before one's eyes at the moment of death, the experience will be no novelty for me. It has happened many times, though it has come less frequently as I've gotten older. Try as I might, I've never been able to grab anything from these storms of images and hold it in my gaze and ignore the others. I've learned to simply let the process run its course, sleep off the consequent exhaustion, and wait for the aftereffects to wear off a day or two later. They are like mini-bouts of bipolar disorder. They waste my time. I blame them on caffeine. My hypochondria tells me they are probably some sort of petit mal. I suppose I'll have to put up with them until I'm dead. Whatever they are, because of them I'll certainly get nothing done tonight. Now, I'm going out to look at the night sky for a while, and then I'll try to get to sleep. Stupid brain disorder!

Activity

The plumber came and snaked the pipes. Lodged in the toilet's trap, he found the screwdriver my dad misplaced a few days ago. How do you lose a screwdriver down a toilet?

Caretakers finally came to remove the worst of the dead weeds in the yard of the vacant house next door. The cat will now pick up fewer nettles when she goes over there. They were too late to save me from the nettle which stuck in my finger this morning as I was brushing the cat. A bit of it remains lodged there now, stinging every time I type r (ouch) t (ouch) f (ouch) g (ouch) v (ouch) or b (ouch.)

In addition to the noise of the cleanup crew, there has been hammering all day. Vertical wood siding is being replaced on the house across the street. A note to all who are buying or building a house: wood siding that reaches the ground ought to be horizontal. It rains. The ground gets damp. Vertical wood siding acts like a tree and sucks the moisture up by capillary action. The wood rots. Our house has some vertical wood siding, but only above a wainscoting of horizontal siding, so the vertical pieces don't get wet on the end. We have no rot. Every house on the street with vertical siding all the way to the ground gets rot.

It is uncomfortably warm in the house today. I'm going out for a while.