Heavy Air

I'm becoming annoyed by the way this storm just hangs around without doing anything most of the time. Yesterday evening's thunderstorm was nice, but since then its been back to the same old overcast, with a bit of half-hearted drizzle now and then. It's been like that for most of the week. Just what we needed- a weather system with the clap.

The chill and damp now permeate everything. The pages of books, the upholstery of my chair, the very walls, all feel as though they had never known warmth. The wold is stored away in some vast room of a deserted mansion, moldering, forgotten. I will dream of mushrooms growing about me as I sleep, engulfing me, absorbing all the rotted trees of all the ages of the forest. I will dream of waking to a fungal world of rubbery, hallucinogenic shapes. A fire needs to be lit in the stove.

( Sunday Verse )

Fire and Ice

There was sunlight this afternoon, but I slept through most of it. I need to do something about my sleeping schedule. It's turning into a train wreck. Again.

The guy at the end of the block still has his Christmas lights going. Originally, I thought that the decorated tree looked like a butterfly, but now it looks like an outline map of the United States, or one of those night satellite views in which the cities are all lit up- except the tree shows a huge urban cluster in the Dakotas. And the lit-up bush now looks to me like a leaping Rhino wearing a costume covered in spangles. Yes, I definitely need to do something about my sleep schedule. Clearly, I'm beginning to hallucinate.

Charlie Chaplin's 1923 box-office failure, A Woman of Paris (he wrote and directed, but wasn't in it) is going to be on Turner Classic Movies at nine o'clock, PST. I've never seen it, so I think I'll watch, if nothing interferes. I will get to be in the warm living room, instead of here in this icebox with Sluggo.

It's terribly quiet tonight, with the rain gone (for the moment.) The cold air is redolent of wood smoke, from all the stoves and fireplaces in the neighborhood. The combination of the smell and the chill makes me picture a fire in a refrigerator. Yes, yes, fix the sleep schedule.