Ending The Week, Anticipating Disaster

 I finally talked to the attorney who had been representing me in regards to my father's trust. He told me that no longer felt it. Nice to have known this since there is a hearing next week. No apology for screwing things up, or putting me in a bind. I have no idea when he was going to tell me his plans. I had written an email on Wednesday night and got gibberish as a response. That is why I went on the hunt. Well, I got no answer to my telephone calls, either.

I spent yesterday morning working on things legal at Bracken Library. I managed to stay there 3 hours soaked as I was through my shoes and socks. I decided finally it was time to go buy new shoes. No, I did not go to work. I needed to get the legal matters done.

The problem of not having a car is the time spent in traveling. What would have taken me an hour altogether - and probably accomplished ore in that time - became hours. After seeing the attorney, I came back to Bracken. More emails. 

I got home a little after 5:30. Tired. I spoke with MW. I got documents drafted.

Today, I worked, and probably over-did it. I have been at Bracken for about 2 hours. I have crashed Firefox three times. I have not gotten through email and I have been distracted by the following:

The Draughtsman’s Contract review – Peter Greenaway’s cerebral intrigue still beguiles (I saw this when it came out - Castleton Square with David M or John Hulse.)

‘Her demons were probably worse’: does Back to Black reveal the real Amy Winehouse? (Like her music, but all that hair actually ehrs?)

Civil War review – Alex Garland’s delirious dive into divided US society

Several Attempts at Understanding Percival Everett because I have been seeing his name of late, and glad I did:

For me, the precise joy derived from reading Everett’s fiction lies in its embrace of contradiction and ambiguity, in its gameness to confound. My favorite Everett novel, 2017’s So Much Blue, arguably his most deceptively simple and yet most artful novel, seems to be divorced from many of the themes and ideas whose surface I have spent the past several thousand words trying to scratch. It follows Kevin Pace, a depressed, aloof, middle-aged abstract painter living with his wife and children. Despite occasional moments of public and fiscal recognition for his art, Kevin has managed to remain at arms length from his contemporaries, and he generally prefers the solitary work of marking art in his studio to company. The secrets he keeps from his wife—an infidelity, a horror he witnessed in El Salvador, and something his teenage daughter confides in him—drive the novel’s plot.

Kevin decides to obscure and abstract these secrets, and the guilt they have created, on a canvas he keeps hidden in a second studio. After his wife learns that he has kept their daughter’s secret from her, they get into an argument, and Kevin decides he doesn’t want to keep his other secrets any longer. He stops himself from speaking “pointless apologies, empty words,” and instead takes his wife out to the studio to show her his painting, on which he has buried his secrets in shades of one color—blue. His wife is confused, but he insists that now she is looking at everything there is to know.

Like Kevin’s painting, Everett’s writing is filled with secrets. Sometimes, we might just not know how to read them.

Now I need to do that legal research I have not yet done, since I will be going and doing the hearing on next Wednesday. Not sure how I will be getting there, but I am going.

sch