Having been sitting here pretty much throughout the day for these last six weeks I find I've been watching all manner of climate change programs running (primarily) on public television, the emphasis it seems on disappearing glaciers. The world's glaciers, all of them on all the continents, are melting. Glacier National Park, for example, will be glacier free in ten years. China and India, who's agriculture as most country's agriculture depends on water from melting glaciers, will lose their ability to feed their people by about 2040. Their major river systems - the Ganges, the Yellow, the Yangtze - will at that point only flow during the monsoon seasons. Food is going to be very expensive in 2040 which is a crappy way of saying millions, tens of millions, will be starving for lack of food and water.

I don't have any illusions we'll do anything about it, not that there's anything left we can do to save the glaciers. That tipping point has passed. Rather like real estate bubbles. You know there's a catastrophe coming but you're making too much money flipping houses to do anything about it. Hi, ho. The way of the world, the idiosyncrasies of the human condition. I hope I'm flat wrong and the tooth fairy really is out there right now checking under kid's pillows.

Nobody wants to hear your miserable opinions.

Later. It's after twelve and I'm lying on the bed in t-shirt and shorts with the window open and a fan blowing air across my body. One day you're wearing a sweater with the heater on high and the next you're half naked sweating. I'd say strange if it didn't happen so often. Mixing this day and the state of my head - you'd think the state of my stomach, but it all seems to go back to the head somehow - mix them with the radio rambling on about something or other in the background (glaciers, probably) and you find yourself swimming in another reality. Drugs without drugs. Fever dreams, old man dreams, yellow brick road dreams. A nap is in order.

Later still. OK, we've reached a point of relative coherence now that evening is an hour away. That seems to be relatively consistent. Coherence at the end of the day when the walks are finished and the naps are finished and I've had a chance to read the mail and sit like a lump in front of the computer. This marks the beginning of the sixth week since I got out of the hospital and all of this “stuff” is supposed to be wrapping itself up pretty soon - six weeks the doctor said - the tired-fuzzy headed stuff, anyway, brought on by the alimentary canal putting itself back together.

I'm kind of hoping whatever energy drain this knitting up requires will finish this week and divert those calories or whatever they are back to, you know, clearer mornings. Afternoons I can remember. The stomach is still sour and kicks back when I eat anything too ambitious and that aspect of the operation is supposed to go on for another couple of months. Except for the four percent or so for whom it doesn't. Get itself back together. I'm assuming I'm not part of that four percent, not something worth thinking about anyway, but every now and then your number does come up. Probably better to have it come up for a sour stomach than, say, a bad prostate, something even less entertaining to think about.

So we'll continue. I've been absolutely terrible about communicating with people over these last weeks. You can cut the ennui around here with an axe. It really does enervate you, gut you like a fish. That's no excuse, of course. Rien sent me a track from his new album and I haven't played it yet because I haven't been willing to get under the table and connect the sound card to the external speakers. Anyone who's even looked at a computer knows that, at least, is trivial, the task of a minute. Plugging in the speakers. Ennui, ennui. How often do you ever think of using that word? Applying it to your existence? Here in Oakland?