Blah.  Sunday afternoon, my Monday morning...

Get up, walk with stiff legs into the kitchen, put the tea water on, taking some of yesterday's second batch out of the refrigerator.  The cat chose to stay outside last night, so I let her in, she crunches on some dry, and then I open a can, sprinkle some Metamucil on it, and put it down outside the porch where she likes to eat.  There are some dirty dishes from last night, the pan to cook last night's halibut and asparagus.  I don't know what to eat yet for breakfast.  I don't know where the vine ripe tomatoes I thought I brought yesterday went.  Did I leave them in the store?

I take an allergy pill under the tongue, one Chinese Skullcap, one Astragalus for inflammation.  The first cup of green tea is too hot.  But I feel it cleansing, helping with that feeling of overripe fruit general in my body from last night's $10 Corbieres red, an odd standout in the Chinese market's shelf, the rest being Monsieur Touton ubiquity.  Not that I really care about wine anymore.  Yes, getting liquids into the system, like a bowel movement, seems a priority.

Ragweed season, sickness, easy to forget stuff, to lose money, leave wallets behind, the checklists seem harder, take more time.  Humid, the hurricane's fingertips, also typical of this time of year in the mid Atlantic.  Stayed up late reading, a decent Saturday night, not minding being so alone reading "The Potudan River," the young couple who must learn how to deal with that blank love that has befallen them in this modern life.

And I'm writing this just to keep my mind alive.

Yes, food and tea are good.  Platonov captures the simple beauty of basics.

Miss Kitty comes in and does something in the litter box.  I bring the rubber made kitchen trash can and make a few scoops of waste.

I never start the day caring very much about, or looking forward to, the familiar faces I will see, I hate to admit.  Familiarity will, at least now it seems, make me a tacit drinking partner with these regulars, and of course, this I do not want to face at the moment, before my shower and dragging off to see what surprises I face on this Sunday eve of Labor Day.  We are closed tomorrow, and I am beyond happy about that.  Maybe at a certain time, after making things happen as far as service and coordination, I will feel that flush of needing a glass of wine, I really hope not, but at the moment I still feel ill from last night's necessary panacea.  How much energy does it take to smile at people, the old couple you know from years of Sunday nights?  It might not seem like much to you, but at the moment, the engagement takes on something of a proportion involving lies and misery, though of course we don't bring our problems into work.  "Keep a positive attitude, don't fight it, let it happen..." yes, I will try to keep motherly wisdom in mind, and maybe the shower will help.

A shower does help, hot warm water pouring over my head and back and shoulders, the body absorbing water through the skin down into the vital organs, making them less sacks of defeat.  Little airways open up in muscle and joint.  I shave, seeking out to scrape off the hair that grows on the animal's face, chin, jaw, neck, under ear, under nose, around the mouth, from the different angles of the grain.

I don't feel any more sanguine about the purpose of my job, its lackings as far as what I want to or should be doing with my middle aged life, but, the body feels a bit better.  The goings in, the comings out, feel good to the animal.

I find there is a huge amount of integrity and truth in Platonov's story here, the difficulty of opening up to that love, as between members of a couple like the young couple, Lyuba and Nikita, the strangeness inherent in the act of acceptance, the impossibility of it that could almost lead on to do something rash, as attempting to get away from it.  I find a lot of truth in that, far more so than the happy-ever-after sort of a thing fairy tale.  The great difficulty of accepting what is even natural to accept, when both parties even completely want it and find the great immediate benefits of its form of being together... or even the howling pain we carry within us, attempting to let that go as we experience this other person with us on a daily basis...  How could we do this, how could we possibly handle that--this I find a very realistic question, and one fairly resolved in a story.

A great story is the finest form of shrinking available, I would gather.

It's nice to know, or think for a minute,
that a writer's 'fictional observations' serve a purpose in this thing called life we go through, say, a realization of the great almost suicidal-provoking pain that befalls us at that vulnerable spot we love one another out of.  As if, the more love, the more great and constant pain, that look found in the eyes that Platonov renders in this story.

And I have to wonder, that for a long time we must rehearse as readers, getting bits and pieces, taking it on faith that we should read Dostoevsky.  On instinct, we know we take to what we are reading about Aloysha, etc., etc..  But, to really sense the import, to get that impossibly great tender quality of life, which we might know vaguely and passively in childhood, we are not so well trained as adults to receive, at least in the necessary modes of thinking we must handle to survive.

As mature readers we can then make insights and judge, 'now that is love as it really is.'

How long does it take us to get there, where we read on our own, from out of the expanded space of our own largely egoless wisdom?  Where we finally see not just the instinctive interest in reading, say, a story, feeling an enjoyment and somehow a betterment, but realize more fully the greatness of that story, of that moment, of that novel, that it serves a real purpose, brings a knowledge that could not have come from elsewhere.  That's how I think writing should be judged, for its wisdom, for the lesson in life that it awakens us to out of a more sentimental and simpler and partly erroneous understanding.

And this, coincidentally, or simply as a side point, to tack on, this is what can be missed in a reading, what can be missed in the reviewer's estimation, if the reviewer comes with prejudgments about what form a piece should take, knows so much about what the marketplace will take as far as 'plot' and 'dialogue' and general 'interestingness,' that the wisdom inherent in the piece is completely missed.  As debut novels are judged.  It is a subjective matter, you might find, but there is wisdom in pieces, and these pieces have the potential to be understood for the greatness, not just studied conjectures aping some acknowledged standard of great wisdom fairly grasped and represented in a clear enough manner.

We might know examples where we sense an author trying to say something that is beyond their actual development, as in the case of the juvenile who writes a piece of great good and, on the other side, great evil, or writes, through mimicry, something they have not in life and through real living understood in depth beyond their precocity.  And this may make you wonder about some  authors, maybe particularly ones who got rolling at an early age, ones who sound maybe a bit too confident, not as subtle as letting things story-like emerge without manipulation.  Life is a science, and it takes time.  It takes real actual living, not just writing classes and an inventive imagination, or a clever marketing angle.  So perhaps we do, as readers, realize that there is indeed greatness to the great standards, like Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Melville...

Or, maybe on the other hand, it isn't your taste to want Buddha wisdom, attainment of yearned for peace of mind, acceptance of great truth.  Maybe you think all that's bunk, and just want to live your own life as it happens without the need for too much thought beyond what to do for employment, where to go on vacation, an ignorant bliss in things and comforts material.  How to guides.  Entertainment by distraction, not lesson.  Well, that's simply a matter of taste, I guess.

One does not want to impose standards on readership and books and things, lest God forbid we incite a book burning.  But maybe we can discern moments of evolution, or that some books just have a lot more deep thinking put into them and can be considered more trustworthy as far as their offers of betterment, not that they would ever beat you over the head with their 'lessons.'  But, again, this is a tricky business, and maybe completely individual about who you may find insightful and trustworthy.  Depends on where you are in life, one might suppose.  For me, anyway, Platonov, he does the trick.