Working Yet Feeling Like a Procrastinator

 I have been adding stuff for the blog, I got groceries (which was a 2-hour roundtrip), watched a little of Northwest Mounted Police, and just because I still have not gotten around to my handwritten notes from 2010, I feel like I have done nothing.

I just read Lessons in Writing and Life from My Grandfather, E.L. Doctorow, and I like Doctorow even more than I did before (I had read Billy Bathgate decades ago and had a collection of his essays - another book that has gone missing since 2010 - and I got around to Ragtime in prison. I suspect he does get forgotten for not being flashy enough - more like Styron and Heller (without their mental health issues) than Roth or Mailer.

Right now, I have Greaser's Lunchbox playing.

Wednesday, after checking into with the sheriff, I dropped in to watch a little of a jury trial while waiting for the bus. Some busybody from the court drew me back to the door, asking what I was doing and essentially saying I had no business in there. The reaction I got when I said I came in to watch the trial was a blend of disbelief and shock. I was surprised by the use of the body cam - the image was quite good, and the audio was surprisingly excellent. I gave up during the trip from Ball Memorial Hospital to City Hall. Today, I saw the headline with the trial's outcome: Delaware County jury finds Muncie man guilty of murder, recklessness.

I put an application for a job at Qdoba's. Online, of course.

This may be actual procrastination: 7 Shakespearean Insults to Make Life More Interesting

A bit of thought provocation I found in Listening to Ghosts A tribute to Hilary Mantel:

But one of the most enduring things I love about Hilary Mantel is that she saw things that weren’t there, that objectively weren’t there, and that she believed whole-heartedly in them. In Giving Up the Ghost she writes about a little girl who died when her nightdress caught on fire, whose picture is kept in a brooch passed down through the family. “It is oval, which is the shape of melancholy, nostalgia, and lost romance.” No it isn’t, not necessarily; an oval is a shape like any other; we merely project meanings onto it. But how breathtaking the way Mantel projects her meanings onto the oval, filling it up with this little dead girl and all the tragedy of her end, as if they had always been there before her birth, just waiting for her, and now they are inexorably there inside every oval. 

Rereading Mantel now, I realize: for so long I hesitated, in my writing, to make such declarations. Oval is the shape of melancholy. Even if I’d made this connection myself, I would have hedged in writing it, trying to leave room for the people for whom circles are inevitably sad, or figure eights. Rereading Mantel now, I think: it’s time to make my declarations, stand by my perceptions. If not now, when? Hilary Mantel’s essays remind me of why throughout my life, no matter what has been happening, what joy, what grief, what banality, I have gone to literature, to art: to help me see the things that aren’t there, but also to give me courage to say this is what I saw.

I called it a night around 9 pm, sleeping until around 6 am. Still congested enough, using the CPAP mask poses a problem. Skipping laundry this morning, went onto reading the email and drafting posts. I fear I have bitten off more than I can chew on transcribing my journal. I did get an idea for a new story. Thinking of lunch while listening to Voodoo Lounge.

sch 10/8 - 10/9