Morning Pages Day 9 -- January 16, 2022

My next incarnation will be at exactly 3:30 PM on January 16, 2022. I’m going to have to get up sometime. I’ve been sleeping on the couch all afternoon. I’m having one of those post-Saturday cases of the blahs. As exciting as the world looks through caffeine and cannabis colored lenses, it is exactly the same amount duller the next day. If I do the math, the ratio of enjoyment to amount of substance consumed will reach critical mass sometime this year. At that point, I will be imbibing infinite amounts and feeling zero positive effects.

My cat is Eddie is looking at me from atop the staircase in my downstairs hallway. She is very confused these days, ever since I put her and her sister on a diet. The fat one, Patsy, weighed in at a whopping 21 lbs when I last took her to the vet. They told me that she was a 9 on the obesity scale. The scale only goes to 9. She needs to reduce her mass by 40%. Eddie doesn’t need to lose any mass. She loses her lunch regularly, and I have to clean up cat barf from various surfaces in the house every other day.

Sorry, Eddie, but there is no way I can free-feed just one cat. I tried putting the food up on a dresser where the fat one never goes. Eddie knocked the bowl off twice, spilling cat food on the carpet. The first time I picked up all the little bits and put them back in the bowl, placing the bowl back on the dresser. The second time, I angrily vacuumed up the whole mess and permanently abolished the free feeding system. I now feed them a total of 1 cup dry food and one 5 oz. can of Friskies, split between the two of them, half in the morning and half at night.

“Delay in response,” I mentally note, as I have just had to get up off the couch to feed the cats and guinea hens, as well as make a snack for myself. “Delay in response” is a text phrase that I get from Emery, when she is going to be or has been away from her phone. Since this is not a real-time journal, I guess it don’t matter none, though, do it?

Here I am on the couch again, listening to the crackle of my toasted nuts cooling off in the bowl with my ½ banana, 35 grapes, 2 stalks of celery and six baby carrots. A snack fit for a king, albeit a lazy, caveman of a king. I slept right through the prime of the afternoon’s activity time, and got exactly nothing accomplished. Right now, this moment, constitutes the busiest I’ve been all day.

I woke up at 8-ish this morning. I stayed in bed until a quarter past nine. Then, I got up, did my morning exercises and got busy making breakfast. I always make breakfast at around 10AM on Sunday morning. This is the time I have my weekly Google meeting with my mom. It was uneventful, as always, and neither of us had anything to report. No news is good news, as we say.

I am watching a show called After Life, with Ricky Gervais. Now, if I’d left out comma in that last sentence, would it have changed the meaning any? “After Life with Ricky Gervais” isn’t the name of the show. It’s simply called After Life. It stars Ricky Gervais. He’s also the writer, director and producer, so I don’t think he needs his name in the title as well. A comma for you, sir, to keep you separated from your work. Also, I wasn’t watching the show with him, he had other plans for today, I’m sure, and doesn’t need to re-watch his own series with me. 

Hmm, it just occurred to me that quotes around the show's title could have avoided most of this confusion, as well as phrasing the sentence ..."After Life" starring  Ricky Gervais, instead of using the word "with." See the kind of shit I go through just to eke out a simple sentence?

OK. One page down. I have earned myself a few spoonfuls of my fruit and nut salad.

I amaze myself by my need to feel productive. Where does that come from? Of course, society has a work ethic that is drummed into you from the time you are a kid. Work for your allowance. Mow the lawn or wash cars for the currency with which you will buy your candy and comic books. In a world of unlimited candy and comic books, with no dirty cars or overgrown lawns, how would one instill in their child the value of the dollar?

I worked for many years, but not enough, apparently. I still have some residual guilt over wasting a day on the couch. I set goals like walking 5 miles per day or completing some outside task, such as chainsawing the fallen trees on my property and burning the dead limbs, to appease my sense of duty. But the only duty I have is to keep my own body and environment in tolerable condition. This is, by the way, a task that doesn’t end, or at least it doesn’t end well. It will be over when I am dead, and at that point, it will be a fail, since I will have kept my routine up as long as possible, and yet still entropy wins.

This is a played out topic, so I won’t even indulge, not even for the sake of filling pages with empty blabber.

Empty bladder.

 

Fiddle faddle, the delicious caramel popcorn treat.

“I am annoying you now,” my phone tells me. It’s Emery. She’s showing me a picture of some caramel brownies that she just made.

I thought I was going to be relating a story right now. I had a thought earlier, one loaded in the chamber, ready to come out and waste everyone’s time, but it never emerged. It wasn’t going to be much, just a random association that needed a backstory. Oh, well. That ship has sailed.

Dum dee dee.

I am not really comfortable doing absolutely nothing. No work, no reward seems to the universe’s stubborn decree. I am determined to undermine this edict at every turn. Do a little less work, expect the same reward. Lather, repeat, until no work is done and the same reward is still dished out. The problem is: the reward doesn’t even seem like a reward after a while. It seems like, I don’t know, oxygen? Gravity? Something taken for granted, and certainly nothing to feel rewarded over.

That last paragraph, the last few pages, actually, deserve no reward. They are a perfunctory exercise, uninspired, unimaginative and entirely repugnant to me. I want to flush them and never look at them. But of course, I can’t. I am one of those sick individuals who must turn around and look in the toilet at what has just come out of my body. Given the journey I’ve gone on, gastrointestinally speaking, I deserve a little pride in my poops. They have come a long way, baby. Dr. Gundry ain’t got nothing on me. Thank you Paleo diet. That’s one box checked on the column of responsible things that I do for myself. I do eat some pretty good, basic food.

Hmm. I’ve gotten into page three territory, and still no sign of an impending inspiration. I’m still just swimming laps. And getting texts, apparently. More pics of caramel pecan brownies, plopped on a plate, a giant pile of carby, delicious goo.

I might get a sense of accomplishment if I decided to make something from scratch. I would also have the built-in reward of getting to eat my accomplishment. The problem would be, as I see it, that I would wind up making food for myself that would be less healthy than the currently boring routine foods that I make for my staple meals. Even Paleo versions of conventional bad foods like cake are all on the far out end of the acceptable scale, since cavemen really didn’t possess mills for making flour out of nuts, nor did they have ovens to bake anything in.

Doot dee doo doo doo doo—doot dee doot doo doo doo doo

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. Jesus loves you more than you will know.

Whoa whoa whoa

That’s the sound of my subconscious thinking about brownies. Oh, fuck this, already. I am lying here thinking about things I should have done today, and I’m not even willing to do this little exercise in creative unblocking? I am truly the laziest man alive. I will be buried in laundry, house dust and mold before I get around to realizing that I’m already dead.

Alright, then. Big finish. What’s on the agenda for tomorrow? Let me just look at the calendar…Hmm. Zip. I guess I’ll be celebrating MLK Jr. day like everyone else. Whatever will I do? I won’t make any promises, since I don’t want to disappoint myself, but I could consider doing what I was supposed to be doing today, ie, property maintenance; a long, boring walk; a load or two of laundry; anything, everything “productive,” to make up for my lack of productivity today.

Tuesday, my amp is supposed to arrive. I will have to be here for that. Wednesday afternoon, I need to take my old amp down to Sac to get it looked at. I’m sure I’ll wind up spending enough on the repair that I won’t want to sell it. I’ll be married to that bitch forever, since I’ve come this far with it already. Why, exactly did I need 75 lb Fender Twin? I think I was super super high when I watched the demo video. My reason took a mini-vacation when I heard the beautiful tones they were getting out of it. It will probably arrive all broken, and I will have to file a claim and get it repaired. And Skip probably won’t want to work on it since it has an overdrive circuit. Damn Fender and their “improvements.”

Is this the final line? Have I come that far today? Good. And if not, too bad, I am done.