Room with crawdads

Anyone who's seen my room can see why sometimes I like to close all the blinds just to be able to open them, for the view from my room is spectacular and is worth seeing over and over.

This doesn't mean that anyone other than I understands why I sometimes close the blinds and reopen them, or that I fully understand this behavior myself, but if someone were to ask I'd say the view is even more spectactular then, whatever the time of day or night, whatever the weather. There are times I feel I could spend a whole day opening and closing the blinds, and then opening them again, but I don't, I have better things to do.

Outwardly, my room's a mess to anyone looking at it, anyone other than the one who's room it is. My stuff is scattered around the room--books, paints now that I've taken up painting, boxes, little backpacks full of things I've forgotten, a poster for a book a friend of mine once wrote, manila folders full of things I've cut out from the newspaper, a stack of bills to pay, the bright orange box that bottle of Glenmorange scotch came in--though I know exactly where everything is. 

And still, some questions like to lay around in my room for months at a time, lazy questions that pose as questions and aren't really interested in answers: why did I keep that copy of The New York Times 'Hardcover Best Seller' list? Was I intrigued by the titles--The Reckoning; Fire and Blood; Where the Crawdads Sing; The Next Person You Meet in Heaven; Nine Perfect Strangers; Kingdom of the Blind; The President is Missing...? I have no idea why I kept the best-seller list in my room all this time, none at all. Was the act some sort of professional jealously/envy, that I as a writer of unpopular books, of Lousy Sellers, might take revenge on writers of Best Sellers by mocking their titles? 

It's possible also that I was intrigued by the language of the titles, as I hadn't known that crawdads sing. 

In my room I make the time of day any time I want it to be. I can pull the blinds down at 10 a.m. and make it dark inside, so dark I can hear the crawdads singing from the swamp outside as the sun goes down, when all the little animals gather to say goodbye.

I crumple up the Best Seller list  and throw it in the recycling receptacle. The president's missing but life goes on.

View looking southwest from the author's window, where he opens and closes the blinds many times each day, searching for the lost president and listening for signs of singing crawdads, an endangered species, January 11, 2019. (Photo by author).