Grumpy

Today started well, but the grading is getting intense and starting to aggravate. A friend guessed that I may be having post-Mountain Day blues, so I choose to blame that rather than losing my Zen due to grading. Somehow, that's a better reason than work being slightly overwhelming. I'll get it all under control tomorrow and feel better before the weekend, hopefully. With any luck, I'll also be able to go car shopping on Saturday to look for something snazzy to replace the 20 year old car... Methinks it's time. At any rate, since I can think of nothing else, here's a song lyric and a poem that have resonated in recent days:

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"...it's a dirty trick I play on myself, imagining [he] might call, just because I've waited patiently..." --We're About 9, "Telephone Booth"
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Summer Nocturne

Let us love this distance, since those
who do not love each other are
not separated. --Simone Weil

Night without you, and the dog barking at the silence,
no doubt at what's in the silence,
a deer perhaps pruning the rhododendron
or that raccoon with its brilliant fingers
testing the garbage can lid by the shed.

Night I've chosen a book to help me thing
about the long that's in longing, "the space across
which desire reaches." Night that finally needs music
to quiet the dog and whatever enormous animal
night itself is, appetite without limit.

Since I seem to want to be hurt a little,
it's Stan Getz and "It Never Entered My Mind,"
and to back him up Johnnie Walker Black
coming down now from the cabinet to sing
of its twelve lonely years in the dark.

Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort.
Starting to love this distance.
Starting to feel how present you are in it.
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Stephen Dunn, from Everything Else in the World. New York: Norton, 2006.