A journal entry in the old style

Ah.. rested at last. Not well-rested, mind you, but some-rested, and better than the last few nights.

Friday night, trying to sleep, and the nose would not stop dripping, so every ten minutes or so I had to blow it out. Then it dried up suddenly and swelled and closed and I’m mouth breathing with the most disgusting taste in my mouth. I’d turned over. Suddenly it’s dripping again. Up and blow. Dry and stuffed again. Mouth breathing. This kept up till at last I took some Nyquil, which is supposed to suppress all symptoms and knock you out. This was at four or so in the morning.

Well, the Nyquil worked all right, except with my mind spinning, I didn’t read labels, measure much, just splashed a shot into a cup and dashed it down. It’s four o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud. When I crawled out of bed, it was afternoon, maybe one-fifteen or so, and, worse, I was groggy, groggy, groggy and my brain refused to kick in. “Fuck you, champ,” it seemed to be saying. “Pouring drugs into me in the night and now you expect bright and sparkling?”

So Kathy’s got a barbecue to go to with her faculty in the afternoon and I need to be presentable. The shower woke me up some, but not nearly enough. The squirrely, gonna-pop-out-with-socially-inappropriate-cracks part of my mind was seething with amusingly deadly remarks all afternoon and I broke into sweats suppressing them all. I don’t think anyone noticed much except peculiarly long delays in response as I struggled smilingly to find acceptable substitute remarks.

I did have a human conversation at last towards the end with an economics teacher who had a disdain for the lies that keep the current culture afloat that was similar to my own. He had launched into a lengthy description and defense of his Roman Catholicism, which had begun with a description of the current mode of confession in his parish. No more separation barriers between the confessor and confessant; eye to eye all the way, which, as he hadn’t been to confession in more than twenty years, had unnerved my new friend. And his wife was seething at the priests suggestion that he read a couple of Bible passages and really pray and meditate over them. “Where are the thousand rosaries you have to say?” he quoted her as saying. But, her protests aside, he’d already had absolution. So there.

Then we drifted into politics, thus completing our circuit of topics forbidden at parties, and discovered that we were both radicals. He had the audacity to have actually read Adam Smith and thus knew that Smith had not endorsed the “free market” as the perfect solution to all problems as it is espoused by the current crop of crap artists running our society, that Smith had identified the problems of greed and wage slavery as pitfalls of capitalism and saw stringent regulation as the cure.

My new friend was not shocked to learn that my political leanings were to anarchism of the syndicalist breed, even nodded approvingly at a point or two, particularly the idea that we should look at corporations not as strongholds of individulism–as anyone who’s ever worked for a corporation and routinely been asked to surrender their ideals and integrity in the name of increased dividends for the holy stockholder knows– but rather as collectivism for the wealthy.

So my inner bitch-making mechanism settled down for a while until, at departure time, one fellow who’d made an impression as a “hale-fellow well-met” and one of those blustery, we know the inside joke, slap you on the back, jostle, jostle with the elbow kinds of ranconteurs, He told everyone to stop by his restaurant (actually his mom’s; she was there, too) and I recognized him at last.

It’d been an irritating tic all afternoon, everytime he spoke. I knew I knew him. I hadn’t been in his restaurant for fifteen years or so although we’d been going there at least once a month because friends went there, and sometimes more often, nearly weekly some months.

The last time we went, one of my sons, who was maybe ten or so, complained that the sauce on his spaghetti was burnt and tasted bad. I tasted it and he was right. When I called the hale-fellow over to tell him, he touched a spoon to the questionable sauce, touched it to his tongue and said there was nothing wrong with it. He would do nothing.

Then my dish arrived, a chicken thing, it had the same red sauce with the same burnt flavor and again Mr. Hail-Fellow-Maybe-Not-So-Well-Met essentially said, “What’s your problem? I told you it was good enough.” I was socially maladjusted in those days and suppressed my anger rather than mad-dogging this arrogant mother-fucker as, these days, I would be more wont to do. We ate, paid, and left but never let the door of that place slap us on the ass again.

Now my brain was active and at home la esposa mio and I watched an unexpectedly funny presentation of Leonard Bernstein’s operetta, Candide. I’d recently re-read the Voltaire and wondered why no one had made a movie of this absolutely hysterical piece of farce, or at least a stage play. So after some Web-searching, it appeared that Bernstein’s piece was the only thing out there and I queued it up and it’d been sitting on the TV for a week unviewed.

The production was unusual. It was a live stage presentation, which very often makes for pretty boring video. But this one had been produced by PBS and they’d stuck enough cameras around to keep the video lively and all the bawdy and satire came through clear as a ringing bell.

But lively comedy has the evil effect sometimes of leaving the brain restless and prowling. Mine certainly was. And the nose and breathing problems returned. I couldn’t sleep. My not-fevered but overstimulated gray-matter would not shut up. Breathing exercises would not work as they require the active use of the nose, which had already told me I was getting payback for all that smoking abuse–I’d started again after a three or four day quit had cleared things up enough that I was actually breathing comfortably, even on the treadmill–so I got up and put on a patch and took a measured amount of Nyquil. This was about one. The last time I looked at the clock it was two.

I woke up at fifteen till six and had a cup of coffee and the front page in front of me by the top of the hour. I kept expecting me my brain to go into that too-familiar grogginess at any moment. I wrote an essay on the madness of the length of the presidential cycle and it seemed rational enough, and found a solution to a poetic problem I’d been dandying about for thirty years. I felt good. Still no collapse.

I was going to attend a benefit I’d advertised for a young woman in the UTB music school in the afternoon and worried that the collapse would come right then. But not. the concert went swimmingly, Young Thomas Raines and his new quartet did outstanding work revivifying a couple of standard jazz charts– Herbie Hancock’s “Cantelope Island” and Donnie Hathaway’s “Valdez in the Country”–and convinced me to lay off about the job situation. This was worthy music and could be marketed, and Thomas had organized it and hustled up what might be a standing gig. Hustle’s the thing if you want to be a working musician as opposed to your every-day working stiff, you know.

So there was a graceful end to a weekend that had begun badly, and we’re patched up this morning, not smoking, and headed for the gym in a bit. There could be hope in this world, yet.