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11.01.01
In the room the women come and go,
Talking of Michaelangelo. I've had lines from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock running through my head for days now. I'm turning 36 in 11 days. It is the end of the world.
The only times I can ever remember having insomnia when I was a kid were the nights before Christmas, Easter, and my birthday. The Good Insomnia. Now my insomnia is all The Bad Insomnia, about things like work and money and relationships and did I remember to turn off the coffee pot before coming to bed. And the pre-birthday excitement has turned into a vague pre-birthday dread.
I never feel mature enough, no matter what age I am. How is it that people my age are in charge of the world? Or can take care of children? Or are allowed to operate heavy machinery, vote, wage war, build things, mold economies, predict earthquakes, invent new as-yet-unnecessary necessities for people to buy, write books that will be around forever? That's supposed to be what the grownups do.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me.
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
The dogs are as oblivious to my personal crisis as they are to the terrorist threats. In dog years, I am going to be 252, and they could care less. Winston and Hyacinth pull at the cuff of my pajamas every morning when I tentatively stick my feet on the floor. I am trying to decide if it wouldn't just be better to go back to bed and put my head under the pillow. They are trying to convince me that no miracle is greater than the miracle that life starts anew each morning, and that the best way to start each new life is to visit the backyard. I let them out, and they both run in crazy, elated circles, full of joy that going to sleep the night before was neither permanent nor fatal. "A new day, a new day, a new day!"
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
I keep coming back to the Tippy the Dog question. Do I want to be an oblivious Tippy the Dog? Why, yes. Yes, I do. I want to get excited about the backyard, and kibble, and the rattle of my leash, and other dogs, and not have a single moment of self-absorbed existential angst.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
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