Near Downtown
Back from work. A good lunch at a Chinese restaurant with friends, in early, my usual schedule, except today was a holiday and I was able to park near the building on the street, no need to feed a meter. I think of it as a free ride, the buses on holiday schedule, who knows when they'll arrive, so drive in, park. I had a brief disorienting moment as I was preparing to leave, thinking, well, where was I parked; thinking had I fed money into the machine behind the Vietnamese restaurant or fed the money into the slot in the lot beyond the lot behind the Vietnamese restaurant? One of those existential questions. Which means, I suppose, my mind is going, along with everything else.
Emmy is still under the bed. She comes out more readily now, but I'm wondering when the day will come when she meets me at the door (making noises about dinner). She's up and running in the morning, ready to be fed. No problem coaxing her out into the kitchen. She comes out from under the bed and wants to be scratched when I get home, but only when I've entered the bedroom to take off my shirt, put on a sweater and a pair of slippers. (Yes, yes, slippers. No smoking jackets, you understand, but it is nice to get out of the shoes, take all the hardware off the belt and out of the pockets and sit at the desk like a human being.)
Sometimes I think we live lives less ably lived as human beings, perhaps to prepare us for the, um, bio-ware realities of coming generations. The twentieth century was a bitch, if only ("if only", he says.) for the wars, but I have this feeling the twenty-first will push the concept of "something else" way beyond the limit. Maybe there are babies are being born who will live for 150 productive years, but at what cost and how many? Who will drop by the way through happenstance? Just what might "happenstance" be in a twenty-first century?
Are we preaching?
Not really. Running off at the mouth, mostly. I'm taking it a day at a time. I'm saying I'm taking it a day at a time. The years coming seem of less interest as time passes, best to focus on this day today. I don't know if this is the common attitude after a certain age or if it's just been a long winter.
Are we feeling sorry for ourselves?
Oh, who knows? The day is nice, the sun is shining, the head is a bit dizzy, but I'm comfortable, here, at the end of the rainbow, near downtown, in Oakland.
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