Monday October 20, 2025
The clock says 5:55 as I wake to go to the bathroom. I go back to bed, wondering if I’ll fall back asleep. The alarm is set for 7. I do sleep, and dream murkily (I fist-bump a little boy in church?), then find myself lying awake and look at the clock. It’s 6:44. I sit up and say, “Ok,” and C. responds, “yeah I’ve been up for a little while, too.” I remember that it’s diary day; go to the office and grab the computer to send off an email, and go to the kitchen to make coffee, thinking about the day.
To wit: I’ve got to get some work done on a presentation this morning so I can meet with my research partner about it this afternoon; depending on how efficient I am, I’d like to go to group meditation at 12; then I have the research meeting at 2; then I have to take my friend to the doctor at 3. That will take a few hours, during which I’ll probably do some work-reading. It’s up in the air whether I’ll get out on my bike today—that depends on how long things take with my friend. I really want to ride because it’s going to be a beautiful, genuinely Fall day (high of 65 and sunny, they say). But I may get home too late: unfortunately, we’re going to have to cross town in the middle of evening rush hour.
With that mapped out in my mind, I sit on the couch and pick up John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. (C. asks if I want her to bring me coffee. Yes.) For a few months now I’ve been reading poetry first thing in the morning when I can, partly as a disincentive to spend too much time on the (consistently horrible) news; also to get myself in a calm, thoughtful frame for the morning.
Typically I work at home on my writing in the morning, until about 1 o’clock, then in the afternoon do good-of-the-order and logistical tasks, exercise, sometimes circle back to work around 4 o’clock until dinner. The days of rushing to gather breakfast and lunch and running out the door to drive to Muncie are over. It’s approaching 14 months since I retired from Ball State (at age 60) and walked away from the raging dumpster fire that is higher education in the age of Trump.
Ashbery is good this morning. I come across this, which is aptly about waking up:
And then? Colors and names of colors,
The knowledge of you a certain color had?
The whole song bag, the eternal oom-pah refrain?
Street scenes? The blur of pavement
After the cyclists passed, calling to each other,
Calling each other strange, funny-sounding names?
Yes, probably, but in the meantime, waking up
In the middle of a dream with one’s mouth full
Of unknown words takes in all of these:
It is both the surface and the accidents
Scarring that surface, yet it too only contains
As a book on Sweden only contains the pages of that book.
This is what Ashbery is like—the poems play out little tiny dramas of consciousness, frequently about the distance between our images/ideas and actual, largely unknowable reality. Very everyday life, in fact. (This poem uses the word “stimmung,” Heidegger’s term for “mood” or “attunement”—the kind of body-mind-consciousness presence through which we experience the world, which is a central concept in the study of everyday life.)
Anyway! I read this, heat up yesterday’s left-over oatmeal in the microwave with apples and peanut butter and a sprinkle of brown sugar, and drink coffee, and read the poem again, then look at the New York Times on my laptop, including pictures of the No Kings rallies around the country. (I went to the Indianapolis one.) I skip past stories about things flaring again in Gaza, and pretty much anything that is apt to make me angry, and read a recipe for kale potato soup, and a story about the cinema-worthy robbery of crown jewels at the Louvre yesterday. C. sits next to me on the couch reading on her own laptop, and mentions an email she sent me about a meditation retreat in New York we’re going to this weekend. I read and sip coffee. She gets up then passes through the room, minutes later, in her workout clothes, heading out to walk along the canal with her exercise pal. I write this diary for 15 minutes, which brings me to 8:43. I love the luxury of starting my mornings slowly now. But it is seriously time to get serious about fixing-to-be-thinking-about doing some work.
I put on vaguely grown-up clothes, pour the last bit of coffee, fill a water bottle, and set up at the living room table, where I spend the next two hours working. I fine-tune a power-point for this talk I’m getting ready for Wednesday, then refine and condense the outline/draft. (Somewhere in here I take a short break and go outside and stand on the porch. It’s sunny, very brisk; the guys across the street who are doing a major rehab of a house are working; I can hear the pneumatic pulses of the nail gun; down the street someone is cutting grass.) By
10:45 I think these presentation docs are about ready to go. I get up and stretch, walk around, do some hygiene. I sit back down and send off two emails related to the talk. I open Facebook and scroll for a couple minutes, looking at photos and reading posts about No Kings marches. I write this diary for a few minutes. Now it’s
11:05. I’m in good shape to go to meditation, so I take care of a few personal tasks: get a barber shop appointment and book a flight for a family visit in November; do some dishes. At
11:55 C. drives us to meditation. This is a small group led by S., a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction instructor and mental health counselor. We meet twice a week in the Presbyterian church. We’ve been going for about a year, since it re-constituted after Covid. We drive through the sunny, leafy neighborhood. The leaves have turned but many are hanging in there.
At the enormous church, in a large, spare, fourth-floor room, the regulars (about six) are there, seated on chairs around a fake candle. S. hustles in a few minutes later. We have some light chit-chat, then the instructor reads a couple quotes about how the left brain constantly spins narratives that center the self but aren’t, you know, true. K., a friendly middle-aged woman, rings the singing bowl, and we sit in silence for thirty minutes.
It’s a good session for me; my mind goes mostly quiet pretty quickly; I get briefly drowsy then sort of hover just above the drowsiness, here and there sinking into a fleeting dream image. I hear the HVAC humming softly, the whoosh of traffic from Meridian Street, occasionally someone’s feet in the room shifting. The diary-day I/eye appears intermittently, watchful, which is fine. Late in the session, awake but not acutely focused, I realize that I’ve been off in a thought pattern but that it has evaporated, and I don’t remember it at all. As often happens, a few minutes before the bell rings, I sense that it’s coming. It rings at 12:45. S. says a few words; we exchange Namaste’s and Have-a-good-week’s, and C drives us home…
where I have to move briskly to get lunch together and get ready for my 2 o’clock. I assemble a salad and some triscuits and eat in the home office, reading about sports, looking over the New York Times (there’s an increase in overdue and defaulting car loans), checking email. I fill my coffee cup and at
1:58 am setting up at the desk for my meeting. J and I go through slide deck, make sure it matches up to the agenda, add a slide, re-order others, trim some text. We talk about the main issues in the larger project, which this talk is helping to clarify. After about a half-hour we’re feeling good about the talk. We shift and talk about our experiences at the No Kings rallies. (Muncie and Indy rallies were both bigger than the previous ones, both slightly more diverse but still very white, white-haired, etc. He guesses there were maybe a thousand people in Muncie.) We sign off at about
2:50 and now I have to pack up to go get J. I fill a water bottle, stuff a couple books in my backpack, and drive over to the east side to scoop him. J. has Parkinson’s and moves slowly, though he seems to be getting about pretty well today. I ask how he is and he says, “I’m OK…actually, I’m tired.” His energy and general acuity varies a lot from day to day and even hour to hour. He’s a little sluggish today, his speech slow to materialize, slow-flowing once it starts to come. But we talk as I follow the GPS directions across town for the next half-hour. He tells me about a book he’s read, Walking with Buddha, about a pilgrimage in Okinawa. At stops, I show him pictures of temples from Japan. At
3:50 we pull into the parking lot of his doctor’s office—a converted house on a dead-end block across from some scrubby woods behind a La Quinta Inn. We sit in the waiting room for a minute; somehow conversation has drifted to my sister-in-law, who also has Parkinson’s, and I tell him how she’s been doing. The doctor comes in (this is an old-fashioned, one-doctor practice) and calls J and J says to me “conversation to be continued.”
In the waiting room I read the preface and first few pages of Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment, a book about the psychology and politics of inequality, the unequal distribution of precarity and privilege. The argument has a linguistic edge about verb tenses which is a little hard to grasp. It’s interesting, though. I underline. The time goes quickly. J comes out after what feels like just a few minutes. He is one of the world’s leading talkers-to-strangers, and he’s gotten into it with the woman working the desk about Superman, D.C. comics, Harley Quinn, their better record with female characters, etc.
Driving back, he tells me about the new Tron movie, and the old Tron movies, then veers into talking about A.I. and Chat GPT. I mostly listen. We sit in some slow traffic. By the time I’ve dropped him off it’s 5—so I still have time not only to ride my bike but to go to the CVS and get the prescription they keep texting me about.
I drive back across town, flipping between the jazz station and NPR. On NPR I learn that about 30 percent of Americans, in a new poll, believe violence might be justified to “get the country heading back in the right direction”—almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. Back to jazz. As I drive, I think: the diary prompt asks us to share our thoughts and feelings. But today has been a neutral-affect day, more or less. Not at all unpleasant. Something like the “neutral mind” you hear about in the meditation world: not desiring anything, not avoiding anything, taking things in. Being with J can be fun, and can be sad. Today: neutral. Happy to see him, happy to help, but the experience isn’t really creating feeling. Neither has today been especially thoughtful. It’s about
5:40 when I pull into the CVS. I quickly grab a diet Dr. Pepper (a bad habit, infrequently indulged) and line up for my arthritis pills. They have to dig them out from the bin for late, procrastinators’ prescriptions. Still, I’m in and out quickly. I get home a smidge before
6 and throw on cycling clothes, fill a water bottle, and head for the bike trail, where I ride, south to 10th street and back, for the next hour. It’s chilly: I’ve put on tights and a long-sleeve shirt. On the trail, people are in heavy sweatshirts and puffer jackets….
And now, in the midst of an internally quiet, mostly neutral-minded day, thoughts roll out, a vigorous steady stream, as I cycle. (I’ve heard meditation people call this “unspooling.”) I’m so caught up in thought that I don’t recall climbing up and over the 38th street bridge, which is the most arduous eighth-mile of the ride. Thoughts include:
- Weather/climate. It’s the first truly Fall weather day—the morning news, the young kid DJ on the jazz station, and my own sensorium all agree. It’s October 20. So, climate change. We had a mostly mild summer, with maybe 10 days of uncomfortable heat in August, and extreme dryness in August and September. Pleasant, except for Fall being sort of postponed. But not good. I asked an Amish woman at the farmers market, in August, how the summer was for them. “A little hot,” she said. The White River, north of Broad Ripple, ceased to flow, was a set of ponds, at least as seen from the bridges. (The same thing happened last summer). I’ve noticed crickets, for the last few months, singing at all hours of the day. Above all, I’ve noticed the fading distinctness of the seasons—something Min-Hyoung Song also notes in Climate Lyricism. He argues explicitly for noticing the weather more consciously, paying heed to our immediate environs, as a way of sustaining attention to the climate, which has proven hard to foreground in our politics. This particular bike route—which is the one I take most often—goes past brownfields, a sewer substation (which some wag has graffitied with the phrase “Farts Shack”), and a smelly magnet factory. Today, it feels as though the weekend rain and the continuing breeze has cleared out the air so that these smells are travelling further. The sewer smell and the factory smell—something like wood smoke with a metallic undercurrent—virtually meet in the middle.
- Violence—remembering that story from NPR gets me thinking about two things that “happened.” One: when I was at the anti-redistricting rally at the state house, a couple days after the Charlie Kirk murder and on the day that Ball State fired a student affairs director for a Facebook post. I happened to be standing right near the podium where Pete Buttigieg walked in. He was standing five feet from me. And I thought, he could get shot. I thought about those films of the RFK assassination—I’d be one of those guys in the film, cradling his shattered head. But it would be hard to get a gun into the statehouse, I thought. But no, actually, state legislators can and do bring their guns to the statehouse. Two: at the No Kings rally on Saturday, a young guy walked by with his face masked, with a back-pack on, and what looked like a microphone in his hand, connected to something in his bag by a wire. I got nervous, and said to C. “walk with me,” and led her about 20 feet away, and told her what I saw. We had just received instructions to “see something/say something” from the stage, and to look for “safety officers” in blue vests. I told C. to stay put and went to look for someone. No one in sight. I came back and said, “Well, I guess it’s alright.”
- Building and decaying. All along the bike path, there are abandoned and disrepaired buildings, some being rehabbed; as well as new apartment buildings going up. A project at 30th street, re-using what appear to be old rail or warehouse structures, was supposed to become some kind of music venue a couple years ago; was abandoned; but now there’s a mock-up of some new development—buildings and parking lots—on banners on the disused buildings. On 52nd street, just down from my house, a tiny convenience store opened a few months ago, was open a few weeks, and is now empty—zero signs of activity, past or present.
- Salsa. C. roasted a bunch of green tomatoes (our neighbors’ enormous plants grew over the fence, and they told us to take anything we wanted) and made salsa. It’s got zing but no depth. I’m scheming on how to revitalize it. Toasted seeds, cocoa, in some hot oil, then szuuszh the whole thing in the Cuisinart, methinks.
When I get back it’s 7:10 and quite dusky—dark, really, too dark to be cycling. C. and I both re-heat last night’s black beans and farro in the microwave and sit on the couch eating dinner. She turns off the TV and we chat about this and that and eat. She bought a book of poems by one of my old grad school colleagues and is really liking it. I assemble a tiny dessert of nuts and two dates and come back to the couch, where I look briefly at social media (more photos and comments on No Kings).
At 8:08 I start watching the baseball game, in distracted fashion. Throughout I send and receive texts from three contacts: G, a new-ish friend who is a fellow baseball fan, with whom I’ve gone to a few games; S.—a close, old friend; and P, G, and R—my brother in law plus two childhood friends, who text, mostly about baseball, on a thread. I also look at Facebook and the NYT now and then. I’m fairly tuned out/distracted; not unpleasantly so. When things happen in the game I rewind and watch them again, then fast forward to catch up. The game is good and close, and in the bottom of the 7th I start watching intently. A Blue Jay hits an epochal home run; a burst of texts. End of the game is really good. It ends a little after
- It’s time for me to start thinking about sleep. S. is still texting. S. is … what shall I say? I think he’s an alcoholic. He’s a lapsed AA person and kind of lives on and around the edges of desperation, with a very sick wife and a very stressful job. I get heart-sprung texts from him at odd times, such as Saturday, while I was out at a fund-raiser gala, and he reported that he was weeping as he downsized his wife’s wardrobe so they can move to a smaller apartment. We have a long, deep connection—he’s a grad school friend—but he can be difficult, and will introduce fraught topics (personal or political) when I’m otherwise occupied or getting ready for bed. (There’s some feeling, finally.) We were happily texting about how nice Canadians are (apropos of the Blue Jays ascension to the World Series) when he said southern U.S. people are also nice, though more problematic, and then went off on the contempt for rural and southern people, from media figures like Jon Stewart, and how that’s helped screw the Democrats. He’s not wrong, but I’m not about to get into this at (now) 11:25. I text him: “Yes, contempt is a mortal sin. Off to bed. More anon.”
And off to bed I go.
Farewell, Everyday Life in Middletown archive, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.