Blues, Confession, And More Snowglobes

Yet another day of doing n.o.t.h.i.n.g. Puttered. Wandered. Ignored the home phone that was ringing. Moved a stuffed santa from one couch to the next. Couldn’t find his pants and thought, who cares? Helped with homework. Which sucked. I shouldn’t bother helping Bridget with anything because she will just scream -- “Why do you always want me to be perfect?” -- which is exactly what she did tonight while working on her letter to Barack Obama, as in “Hey Barack, get some smart people together and fix the war, k?” which made perfect sense to me but I guess it was my tone and suggesting that we not refer to the president elect by his first name.

I don’t have to cook a second dinner at least, since The Kid left today for LA. Won’t be back until next Friday. Which is wildly effed up, Christmas-y timing wise and all, but frankly I am sorta relishing the solo time (and the fact that he has a job). Still, “solo” is a relative word. Solo in my case is a three-versus-one kind of solo.

The truth is I am bored. I am bored of almost everything. Bored of my house, bored of my car, bored of the teevee and the radio and the news, bored of music (even!), bored. Bored of the boringness that runs laps through my head. Bored of being on a track of boring, which is so completely and utterly boring.

The truth is if I force myself out of the house, for the non-obligatory kind of things, I get bored of my boring thoughts that I will have nothing but boring things to say. That's the kind of mother of God boring I speak of. 

Which I realize sounds a bit like a bigger kind of Blues. Pretty sure it isn't. Been there, at least once before, and this just feels like... malaise, a word that stands in quite elegantly for, um, "bored."

So I sent my friend some pictures but not every picture tells a story (so says Rod Stewart) and sometimes pictures are not always the story you wanted to tell or even the real story or maybe even any story at all. Sometimes, a pretty picture is just a pretty picture, a bunch of pixels strung together. Sometimes, a pretty picture is snowflakes flung about and hanging in some weird sticky liquid place, waiting for someone else's imagination to make it what it should be or at least how you wish it was. 

The pictures I sent did not tell a story that was "boring" or "bored" or "ho hum" or "whatevs." They seemed so completely carpe diem and engaged and I don't think I am either thing right now. Still, I'm glad I sent them, because as it turns out, after I confessed the feeling of fraud, I discovered that the boring thing seems to be a minor plague upon the land. Seems I am not the only one living in Boreville.

Maybe I need to shake up my imaginary snow globe and see another picture, a new pretty town all my own, a city on a hill, a whole new world of possibilities. Maybe I should shake it up and the scene will change with the snow and where it lands. The whole thing -- the boredom, the blues, all the blah blah blah -- maybe it exists in my fist. If the tiny world under glass is mine, right here in my grip? Then I should know that whatever it is I need or think I want, all I need to do is flip it over, shake shake and see what happens.

Maybe this is exactly why I write. Because I like manipulating words, twisting them, turning them upside down in my mouth and over and over in my brain and coming out in the end with a whole new something I never expected. Maybe I need to do that right now. Maybe I am.

Insert your own snow globe.......












here. 

Oh, and happy shaking.