Nov. 14, 2024
6:37 – I wake without the alarm, eight minutes before it’s set to go off. It’s still raining outside; I can hear it dripping. I’ve been dreaming—something about me and another guy struggling with a third guy, twisting the arms of his coat and trying to get him out of an apartment. Earlier I dreamed I put on E’s pants, then was listening to a music album produced by E., saying to others “It’s interesting how E. works: she doesn’t sing but she writes the music and arranges it. It’s her music.”
I put on the sweatshirt I left on the bureau last night and walk out into the living room. I pick up my computer, write a work email, and write down the dreams. As I’m doing this the alarm goes off in the bedroom—classical music station. I start writing this diary.
I pause for a moment and look around the room. The housecleaner was here yesterday, and we haven’t put the knick-knacks and things on the mantle and the shelves. We live in a little 1929 craftsman with wood built-ins—lots of little surfaces to decorate. This makes me think about the fact that we’re trying to shed some stuff in anticipation of moving in a year or two, to an east coast city, where we’ll surely have a smaller place.
In the other room I hear C. stirring. She’s turned off the radio. I can hear her shaking her vitamin bottles in the bathroom, shaking out pills. The heat just turned on and I can hear its hum….
7:32 – I’ve done morning ablutions & made coffee, making an error I sometimes make that leads to a minor kitchen disaster: I forgot to put the lid on the coffee pot. This causes the water to back up in the filter/carriage, so that when you do correct your error and put the lid back on, coffee spills over the heating tray and onto the counter, and you get a ground-filled pot of coffee. So now I’m seated on the couch, with Thelonious Monk Alone in San Francisco playing on the stereo, with my coffee, which I ran through a strainer, and a bowl of cereal and Bulgarian yogurt (go, gut biome, go!).
C. has just left for a doctor’s appointment. We chatted for a few minutes. She mentioned a friend who’s an executive for a vaccine company whom she talked to yesterday, who told her that demand for vaccines has plummeted in the U.S. She also talked to him about travel—he’s traveled a ton, and we’re planning a trip to Japan (probably) next year. And she made today’s first reference to the political catastrophe, mentioning Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz as attorney general. “He won’t’ get confirmed,” I say. “We’ll see,” she says.
Monk is playing “Ruby My Dear” and I need to eat my cereal and start getting ready for my therapy appointment.
[Digression on things you won’t be reading about in this diary: 1) what I listened to on my drive to Muncie. I have retired after 24 years at Ball State, and I now go to Muncie only about once a month. Not today; I went yesterday, in fact. It’s been just over over three months since my retirement date. 2) Teaching or working in admin offices. (See #1). 3) Accounts of reading or listening to the news. Trump won the election last Tuesday; I’m not exactly on a news blackout—I’m reading the headlines and flipping to NPR in the, now relatively rare, moments when I’m in the car. But I’m also holding the whole catastrophe at an emotional distance, and not inviting the anguish in by poring over the newspapers online. I put myself on a news fast the Wednesday before the election; I’m off the fast now but only dipping in briefly and irregularly. End digression.]
From 7:30 to 9 I get ready for my therapy appointment and then, at 9, have the appointment via Zoom from the home office. I’m getting ready to wrap up with this therapist after > 10 years. I wanted to stay with her through the transition to retirement; now I want to spend a few months worth of bi-weekly sessions going over the big issues (vocation, spirituality, the body, meaning) and then wrap it up. Takes some prep work. We talked this plan out today and she’s on board. We talked about the election, about staying in the moment, not getting lost in speculative fears about what comes next, keeping our eyes open and seeing what the world requires of us.
Now it’s 10:06 and time to start fixin’ to be thinkin’ about doing some work. In my retirement I am writing a book with a co-author about (guess what?) everyday life. My daily m.o. is to work on the book for about four hours—setting my alarm for 45 minute increments—which usually gets me to a point where I’ve made some progress and am tired. Then I do other things: delete emails, house stuff, good-of-the-order, exercise, sometimes back to less-intensive book tasks, etc. I’m feeling tired right now, not sure why, but I’m going to put in a couple 45-minute sessions.
From about 10:15 till 12 I work on the couch in the office, reading, highlighting, and taking notes on an article written by three sociologists about “attachment”—about the theory of infant attachment to caregivers, the solid social science of it, the way it’s been taken out of context and mobilized by conservative politicians in Britain, and the ways that contemporary theory can shed light on how this primary attachment does and doesn’t relate to the ways we become attached to people, ideas, a self-image, and the social as adults. I’ve just this week finished drafting a chapter about caregiving, and this stuff about attachment will help me to write a little follow-up “interchapter” to go with it. The article is interesting and the work absorbing.
C. comes in at 11 from her morning appointments and chats for a few minutes. I go back to work. At about 12 she leaves for her appointment at the gym with a trainer. A minute later I leave and go to a group meditation I attend twice a week at a nearby church, getting there at
12:15. There are only four people here today including the instructor, a kindly and gentle 50-ish fellow named S. He’s got a couple meditators on Zoom and the three of us in the room. It’s just the regulars/stalwarts today: me and Co. and L, a middle-aged woman and a woman of 70, respectively. I’ve been coming to this twice a week for about three months. S. leads for a couple minutes then we sit in silence, trying to quiet our minds or at least be attentive to the way our minds aren’t quiet. I have a good session—as has been happening lately, about 5 minutes in I start to get a little drowsy, then I make an effort to keep myself in that place—not starting to dream or nodding off, not following little sparks of chatter or getting off on a train of thought. Towards the end of my session I start thinking about food, about digging some stock out from the freezer and making gravy to go with chicken for dinner. Then the bell rings. It went very fast. I’ve advanced in my practice lately.
I walk out, chatting with the other meditators. It’s cold and wet, and there’s a light spritz in the air. This means no walk for exercise today, I think. I get in the car and drive to the grocery store, where I buy salad mix, celery, carrots, potatoes, salad dressing, soy sauce, pears, and blueberries. (A mix of impulses and things we were out of). I go to the bagel shop down the way, noticing that a Williams Sonoma is opening in the strip mall.
I drive home, put groceries away, and get lunch together: a bagel with cream cheese and smoked trout and a salad. C. is in the living room watching TV while she eats her lunch, so I go into the office and read the New Yorker while I eat. The cover is a silhouette of Trump. A main feature is a set of mini-essays, called “Dispatches,” from famous and staff writers, about the election. Will I read these? I don’t know. I might. (Disclosure: I did hear about 3 minutes of radio news while driving—more on Matt Gaetz as attorney general). Coming out of the Whole Foods I put on “Stolen Moments,” the jazz classic, so I can listen to Roy Haynes’s drumming. Haynes, who played with Charlie Parker and Monk and everybody, and who I saw on a sticky night in Chicago, in the early 2000s, in a club with no air conditioning, died yesterday at 99.
I read a couple New Yorker articles—a review of a book about the 20th century novel, a film review, cartoons—reading the magazine from the back, as I sometimes do, while I eat. This takes me to about 2:30. I wash some dishes and make coffee. I feel better after meditating but still a little tired, and I cough once or twice while I’m washing dishes in a way that suggests maybe I’m coming down with something. (On social media, there’s evidence that some folks at a conference I was at last weekend got Covid.) For the past 20 minutes I’ve been writing these notes and sipping coffee and it’s
3:06 and time to get back to work. I finish reading and note-taking on the article and then pick up Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, and highlight and scribble in margins and make stars and asterisks next to places to look at as I get ready for tomorrow’s writing. Berlant’s ideas are exciting, and for a moment I think about working straight through till 6, at which point I’ll make dinner, but now it’s
5:18 and my eyes are tired and I am generally tired. One of the luxuries of retirement is that, most of the time, I can stop working when I’m tired, a freedom which, widely distributed, would be the mark of a just society. So now I’m going to put some music on and do some stretching, as I recognized during meditation that my body is very creaky and tight. Then I’ll shower.
[note: I stared vacantly at Facebook for 11 minutes before getting up and stretching; I didn’t put on music till later]
5:45—I take a quick shower, then I put on sweats and an old Henley. I spend the next hour cooking dinner and putzing in the kitchen. Mashed potatoes, roasted broccoli, a delicious little sauce (see account of meditation at 12:15, above), along with leftover cold chicken. Thelonious Monk Live at the Five Spot plays. Roy Haynes on drums, finding those oh so bluesy, oh so unexpected Monk notes and rubbing them in with the kick drum. I text this observation, along with a link to the song “In Walked Bud,” to my childhood friend Pete. Back to cooking: relaxed, absorbed, moving back and forth from fridge to sink to counter to stovetop. Everything is done at
6:40 but C. is not back from her early evening event, so I keep the sauce on low. I sit on the couch for a few minutes; C. has texted to say she’s on the way home and that RFK Jr. has been appointed secretary of health. I look at the stock market app and scan the NYT headlines, quickly. (Barely touches me.). At
7 the Monk music suddenly stops. This means that my stereo Bluetooth has linked to C.’s car, which just pulled up the driveway. She changes clothes and I serve up dinner, which we eat while chatting on the couch. About halfway through we put on an episode of “Franchise,” a pretty funny new streaming comedy about people making a second-tier superhero movie. At about
7:30 I say to C.: “What will you give me if I do the dishes?” She says, gratefully, “I will give you a hundred dollars.” I do the dishes—just a baking sheet, a pot and a saucepan, as I cleaned all along as I cooked. I wash a pear and head back to the couch, where I open up the computer and write this. C. sits next to me on her computer. At one point she opens an email from the venue in Bloomington where we’re seeing an opera this weekend. It’s an adaptation of The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, the Michael Chabon novel about the golden age of comics. C. is upset by trigger warnings about sexual and homophobic violence. We talk about this for a while. While those warnings are technically accurate, it doesn’t give a correct impression of what the story is like, I say. I don’t think it will be upsetting (based on my reading of the novel), but I am sorry that she doesn’t feel good about going now. We’re committed to going with friends.
I’ve been writing this for a while. It’s 8:46. A moment now of mindful tuning-in: I feel relaxed and less tired than I have all day. (I don’t know what that was about. I thought I had slept pretty well last night.) My mind is fairly quiet. While I was working from 3-5, my mind was intensely engaged, even though I was still physically not very energetic. Stretch and shower felt good and dinner was good: I’m satisfied and not overfull.
In the midst of my writing this C. offers a few tidbits from the news: RFK Jr. believes that the food supply is the major factor in the “obesity epidemic.” Well, he’s right about that. Later she remarks, “So many of these people are unqualified.” She tells me about Marco Rubio saying that women shouldn’t serve in combat. The secretary of defense’s top rank was Major.
At some point, I will pay more attention to this sort of thing. Sometime soon. But my relationship to it is to be determined, in response to how the history we live plays out. This is what I’m reading about in Laurent Berlant: “the desire for the political,” the affective connection to a politics, to the state, to hopes for the future, to virtual political communities. I will make decisions about this as I go and do the best I can.
Et voila!, my mind isn’t so quiet. Time to watch some more TV or something. It’s
8:55. We watch this evening’s “Jeopardy.” C. goes to bed, and I watch an episode of Disclaimer, a streaming thriller with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, with an intriguing premise: a celebrated documentary filmmaker receives in the mail a self-published book, telling the story of something terrible she did years ago, which she’s been able to keep secret. Complete with sex scenes that certainly rise (ahem) to the definition of softcore porn. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m falling asleep by the time it’s over, so that’s it for today.