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The Skull Preceding Winter
These sequential days of cold, damp and drizzling make a person want to cry out in angst about how hopelessly winterlike it is getting as that person--clue, its me--gets ready for his first real winterlike climate in twenty years or so.
I lived for ten years but not anymore in New Orleans--I'm east coast--and in New Orleans you didn't really think about winter except on those two really cold days every year. Sometimes you would think about winter after it was already in the past and think how that wasn't much of a winter, if indeed you could even remember what winter was like in places that have real winters.
People talk about early snow this year and I have pinned one predictor down to--by mid November there will be a first snow.
You ever heard that Gil Scott-Heron tune, Winter in America?
I washed the dishes in my sink yesterday. They were props of domesticity. Some were dirty and some were clean. There was some mold. There was a little sludge-water in the bottom of some glasses. They had been acting as props for what is very possibly three months. But as a baby step towards genuine domestic behavior I went ahead and cleaned them up and put them away, yesterday.
I am still holding on to a few elements of suspect behavior regarding the idea of a man taking care of his business. I suspect the doing of those dishes (and the unpacking of some dishes that were wrapped in paper sitting in 30 gallon trash bags in the garage) was an act of self-prodding, which is different, more constructive, than self-flaggelation, and that other one, self-deprecation.
I'm just sitting here, off the clock, doing nothing really, as a caretaker, which is my current station in life (being a caretaker). Being a caretaker is complicated and takes careful consideration. I consider things on my own time though. I don't charge for it. No one could really afford me if I did.
I was in a used bookstore yesterday that priced its books as things of value themselves. Like first editions, even of common crap, were more expensive than reprintings. I bought a used paperback for five dollars even though that is approximately ten times what I would generally spend on a used book. I had touched the novelty skull on the wall and set it off screeching or laughing for a period of time that would be my best example of an interminable length, and as much as anything that was why I spent five dollars at the bookstore. I was being penitent more than I was being supportive of a local bookseller.