WAKING UP
Almost everything that has happened with me in the last two weeks has been internal, of no interest to anyone besides myself and not very interesting to me, either.
On Sunday I roused myself to take part in putting Kathe‘s ashes in our joint gravesite. It was a good day and I wrote a post. The first week of having Covid, I was miserable and simply trying to get through, the second week the painful cough suddenly subsided, although I am still coughing up phlegm constantly, but I felt listless and with no desire to do anything. It wasn‘t simply tiredness caused by being sick, it was as if a switch had been turned off and nothing at all was stimulating or interesting. I liked talking to people when they phoned me but immediately afterward settled back into torpor. Yesterday I tested negative for Covid but did nothing all day and finally at 7:30, not sleepy, but not wanting to do anything at all I lay down early and went to sleep, waking at 4 this morning unable to sleep any longer.
And today I felt really good, all day. All I can attribute this to is Covid. Until this morning Covid had turned off whatever it is within me that wants to be open to the world around me and to respond to it. This is some animal part of me that is the same thing that motivates a dog or a cat or any living thing to make its way through the world. Living creatures don‘t decide to be energized, I can‘t decide to be energized, it just happens. And this morning it happened to me. Somehow Covid had blocked that inner drive for two weeks and this morning let go. It is all a mystery to me.
Susie called and invited me to breakfast at Liberty Cafe in a garden in the center of town. It was a beautiful clear cool sunny morning. It would have been just as beautiful a day earlier and I wouldn‘t have noticed it. But today it seemed marvelous. We talked about travel to Europe when she can get off and when we can find cheap tickets. After that I went to Trader Joe and looked for fruit and frozen international dishes that would give me pleasure. The day before nothing would have interested me and I wouldn‘t have gone. Then I came home and wrote some letters and had a long nap and read the news and had a full day. The day before I had napped most of the day and had been interested in nothing.
The point of all of this is the realization of how little control I have over anything that I do or don‘t do. Something inside me impels me along. Something touched me when I bought a month long Amtrak ticket on a whim and led to my having a marvelous month on the rails with little idea of what would happen. Most people aren‘t touched that way and stay home. And now for two weeks I didn‘t have the smallest drive to even get out of bed and could have no more made an Amtrak trip then flown to the moon. Whatever motivated me earlier was turned off by Covid and when motivation returned it came out of the blue and simply pushed me along. All of this is beyond my control or my understanding.
And the more I learn about what does motivate me and make me feel alive and what immobilizes or suffocates me, the more I realize that I have no control over most of that either. Mostly I am energized by things that most people feel are harmless enough and are unthreatening, that are nice hobbies and pastimes and a way for an old man to get through each day. But I am also aware that a number of things that energize me and make me feel very alive are so intense and so threatening to other people‘s identity that I have to keep my mouth shut and not mention them or even share them. There are questions about their identity that I would like to ask people about, but know that if I ask I will either seem intrusive or perverse or creepy in some way, so I keep my mouth shut. It is safer to be an amiable, slightly unsteady, benign old man. But something in me when turned on makes me want to explore and ask questions because this makes me feel alive, but when turned off by covid or suffocating routine convention the lack of this inner drive makes me comatose as I have been the last two weeks.
So internally that is what has been going on the last two weeks. Externally absolutely nothing has happened.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 