To Live in a Pandemic of Gnomic Utterances

1

The newspaper reports that I’m standing on the bank of an atmospheric river.

Yet it seems there’s been a drastic drop in water levels in the western United States between the years 2019 and the present.

 And so, I am feeling slightly depressed, having just received a text from my sister-in-law who lives in Las Vegas of pictures of the Colorado River taken in successive years—2019-20-21-22; it seems we’re on a sinking ship with no one around to walk on water on our behalf.

2

Q: Does one lay in bed or does one lie in bed?

 A: Yes, one does.  

3

I am lying in bed at the moment reading “The Hearing Trumpet” by Leonora Carrington, thoroughly enjoying the story and almost every word in it. It’s such a funny book about old age, told with such physical, mental, and spiritual accuracy that it caused me to go to the internet to look at Leonora Carrington’s paintings, for which she is better known and justly celebrated as a ‘surrealist.’

4

It’s while reading Leonora Carrington that I decide to take a day off from thinking or from even trying to think—as the banks and the stock market and the post-offices are closed for the day anyway—and to re-imagine myself as a bird who is utterly and completely free. And then to get out of bed to see what I look like in the mirror; that is, if anyt transformation has taken place. 

5

Looking in the mirror I feel free, but It’s not a bird I see. Birds aren’t really free, they have responsibilities, complicated social lives, family and friends and enemies and so forth.

King tide at sunset, absent fisherman, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, December 24, 2022.