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Some weekends bear up under scrutiny and analysis better than others. This past one was one of the others.

I was behind all weekend, and the hacker's attack put me even further behind.

And being the computer whiz that I am, I did still more damage while trying to repair the hacker's damage.

And then.

And then.

Before I was ready, the Sunday afternoon chiaroscuro appeared, those few moments of beautiful, mixed and slanted light, light that demands a pause, that demands homage to the passing of something obscure, a signal of the end (never the beginning) of something -- even though the something always remains veiled, a something sensed, a something apprehended but not comprehended, a whiff of mortality or immortality (they can, after all, be hard to distinguish).

A poet adrift in a hammock under clouds might be permitted at just such a moment to proclaim that he has wasted his life, but real people with mortgages and subscriptions and kids and appointments don't say that with earnest force, do they.

Do they?

But then sometimes.

But only sometimes.

Something else happens, a reminder that little has been wasted, and the something else that happens permits the frustration, sadness, emptiness, whatever it might be, to be laid off to something sublimely ordinary, the premature onset of the Monday morning blues cycle, for instance, rather than to anything so inconsequential as the invasion of a hacker, or so shadowy as an intimation of mortality.

The hammock/waste reference in the journal comes from James Wright's poem, "Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota."

Reading:
Still Fay

Watched:
Sunday, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful