3/22/2020: Up very early
(4:30 AM?) to write down dream. Then started a new document to mark down new
terms for the Morgish Lexicon. Then prayers, Bible, and partook in a Mass on
EWTN. The sound was off, but subtitles on, which I read aloud, and I had a very
moving experience at the elevation of the Host. Then worked more on Lexicon,
trying to mark the Seven Beards and reconcile what I’ve said about them
already, then went in and baked cake [For Andy’s birthday]. Had Kam’s leftover
tacos for breakfast. Went in at 1 PM to ice cake, and a little later we had a
piece and sang Happy Birthday. Finished Lexicon, mailed John a copy, and had
some ramen with leftover mushrooms for lunch. Saw some old Electric Company
animations – “Happy Birthday Miss Jones”. Not rainy today, but very muddy, and
cloudy and cool. Ready for a nap, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIK11lzM35Y
Miss Jones
Had a nap. Rosary. For
supper we had leftover Chicken Express, and I had to eat up the chicken salad
from Tuesday. About 8:30 PM Yen started reading AGODP [A Grave on Deacon’s
Peak] and got through three chapters. He’s using a Kindle version, which I am
not sure got all the corrections and updates it should have, and it followed
his reading of “Treasure Island’, which is a hard act to follow. In the wake I
went back and read the whole book again, which I haven’t even looked at in
months. It is now exactly midnight, and I think I shall hit the hay.
3/23/2020: Up at 6 AM,
prayers, Bible. Straighten up the house. Another day of quarantine, or, as I
should day, another day quite as usual for me, as the only place I ever went in
a week was usually church. And I do miss that. Susan and Andy provide for me my
daily wants; they bear the brunt of the burdens of these times, and I pray
daily for them, and thank God for their charity. Now that KK is ‘finished’, I
must consider my next move: to work on rewrites or finish the next chapter of
BB2. I could do both, a little at a time I suppose. Get the machine cranked up
and going. Hopefully things will dry up today. We sit in the shadow of doom,
and there is some good in it: whether we believe, as the Chinese claim, that
COVID-19 is somehow an American plant or plot, or whether it started naturally
in China with some people eating bats, the universal encounter with suffering
gives us a common cause and experience, and, paradoxically enough, while it
physically separates us it can actually remind us of our shared humanity, our
connectedness, and make us thirst for human contact. In the shadow of death, we
show whether we are a light or simply another part of the darkness. ‘All that can
be shaken will be shaken, and what cannot be shaken will remain.’ And
that’s my thoughts on that.
Watched a lot of Electric
Company animations and skits today, recalling old catchphrases that entered our
Babellian speech.
Ramen (with eggs and bread)
for breakfast, a turkey and cheese sandwich for lunch, and then broccoli salad
and ramen with couscous for supper. Laid down and napped, then up and washed
up, and then Kenny was already reading AGODP. He read FIVE chapters, and I
can’t believe how quickly they went by, when they took so long to write. There
was one listener that seemed very enthusiastic about it. [Ann Bellinger].
Afterwards Yen said Isabel had read KK and loves the Morg civilization, and
Morgs in general, and that fills me up with happiness. Now almost 11 PM, and I
must to my Rosary.
To John: Not a whole lot
going on; that is to say, no writing, yet, as such. Just my normal Monday tasks
of doing the wash, making a broccoli salad - it takes over an hour! - for the
week, and today I forced Kameron to get out of his pajamas and dress in REAL
CLOTHES, so at the end of this quarantine he won't have devolved into wearing a
diaper. I can't believe I actually welcomed the sun after the moosh of the last
few days. I feel myself wondering is it hot or do I have a fever, the sneaking
fears that plague you during a plague. I'm doing a little devolving myself,
watching old "Electric Company" episodes - not completely, but
zipping forward to animations and familiar skits. Of course, the ubiquitous
Bill Cosby is all over it, as he was on Captain Kangaroo and other kids shows,
which makes it a little odd. It's weird to see little bits and pieces that
recall old phrases. "My Brother's Mother is My Mother Too (or
Nosferatu)" or "Happy Birthday Miss Jones, You Sure have Nice
Bones" (or Steve Jones). Also started again on Marcus Aurelius
"Meditations"; his style is mellifluous, but almost too fast, you
have to really slow down to analyze what he's saying - but that could be the
translation. More of Kenny's performance of AGODP tonight. I told him R.L.
Stevenson was a hard act to follow. He told me a friend of his had ordered a
copy last night.
3/24/2020: Up about 7 AM.
Dressed, prayers. To spare our bottled water supply (which is suddenly at a
premium) I am switching my Lenten fast object from tea to candy. Let me
explain. I make my tea from hot tap water, which does not tax our bottled water
(out of the tap it tastes foul, but with tea and sweetener it’s – tolerable).
Given my physical disabilities and the present situation, I understand it is
allowable – but it still makes me uncomfortable. Now 9 AM.
To John: I should tell you
that Kenny read 3 chapters Sunday night, 5 chapters Monday night, and I reckon
he'll finish the last 3 chapters tonight. It's a bit humbling to hear what took
me so long to compose finished in three nights. But it ain't LOTR - and that
took years to write.
Breakfast: Leftover boiled
eggs. Lunch: ramen with an egg and bread. Supper: corn on the cob (but not for
me – no teethshes), turkey chili, and rotini noodles.
Cooking supper was a hot
business, especially since I started a little late (I had just turned a page of
‘script’ into ‘prose’ for KK), and Kam wanted ‘grill cheeses’, and I couldn’t
figure out the key to the outside freezer (but now I know). Rosary. The evening
was spent listening to Yen read Treasure Island, and then the last 3
chapters of AGODP, which he ended by praising the rest of my BoS tales. So I
end the evening on a high note here a little after 10 PM.
3/25/2020: Up about 6 AM.
Showered. Prayers, Bible. At 9 AM made
my ramen, and chicken salad (a mistake on my part, but forgiven); had a sammich
for lunch and made cornbread, then at 2 PM started the stew. Pork stew, with
onions, celery, carrots, and potatoes. Lovely. Rosary. Went in at 8 PM and made
Kam Tx toast and taquitos and cleaned up. Opened the outside freezer for the
first time. Came back in, then started watching Yen read Treasure Island.
Today I wrote about Mora
Madra, Mog’s wife, then a small history of Gorb, a Morg mentioned as an epithet
in KK. Happy with these compositions but haven’t heard any feedback yet (9 PM).
The night is basically done.
An old memory: us brothers
taking a bath together, ‘drinking’ bathwater out of a blue plastic whale and
calling for Darby M’graw.
3/26/2020: Up, and prayers,
Bible, dressed. At 9 AM made Kam bacon and eggs and had my ramen. A little
after noon, more ramen, and a chicken salad sandwich. Rearranged my room for
the Rotts, as the exterminators are coming. Grassed the Chis at 3 PM, penned
the Rotts up in the Guest house by 4 PM, Andy and the exterminators came, then
I let the Rotts (after combing huge hanks of fur from their coats) out about
5:20 PM. Susan was home. I heated up the leftover pork stew. I wrote one little
poem (They Say Swans) and translated about half a page of KK. With the couch
moved I fixed up the shelf behind it, moving books and cleaning up. Kenny
started Jungle Book tonight and continued Carmilla. Rosary.
Shower. Now 10 PM and ready to sleep. But shall I? The room is in a new
configuration.
[SWANS, THEY SAY
Swans, they say, before they die,
Intone one last melodious cry.
Even so, when Death comes
winging,
I hope that it shall find me
singing.
3/26/2020]
3/27/2020: Woke up about
2:30 AM, and when it became clear I wasn’t getting back to sleep, got up, did
some more straightening and rearranging, and said my prayers, read my Bible,
and said my Rosary for Friday. The Rotts seem to be barking outside – or is it
the neighbor’s dog? Why am I so restless? Now the big couch is in a very good
spot to watch TV, and the loveseat is facing it – which covers up a few books,
but not entirely. Maybe I should translate the other half of that page. The
germ of a story idea: Korm and Roth somehow get through the Domain of Doors and
visit Earth. Muzzles disguised by safety masks? Ancient Bob (expy of me)
encounters them and gets them home? Did some calculations: if I live to June 7,
I will be exactly Mom’s age when she passed away.
E-mail to John, which pretty
much sums up the day to 2 PM: Yesterday
we had a visit from the exterminators, which necessitated me having to host the
Rottweilers for a while, which meant I had to move some furniture to corral
them off from more sensitive areas. This led to them shedding copious amounts
of fur with all the scratchings I had to apply to calm them down, which led to
a great sweep-down when they left. This led to a re-arrangement of furniture,
which put my couches both in a better line of fire for the window fan and a
better distance to watch the TV from, and more access to some shelves. THAT led
to a better propping and clean-up of those shelves, and THAT led to a sudden
ambition to straighten up the Archives, which had gotten shuffled around a bit
through the months. Also striking me in the middle of the night was an idea for
a bit of fun; a new short story which I wrote on most of the morning, which I
think YOU might be the only proper audience for, so Babellian it be. I can't
say the Archives are in perfect shape yet, but - and I can't stress this enough
- they are better than they were. This sort of thing usually
takes a pass or two before I'm completely satisfied. This going through the
Archives reminds me of my nagging ambition to get a printer and make clean
physical copies of all my work, both new and old.
For supper made Gorton’s
fish in butter, fried potatoes (a tedious process, since I made them here in
the guest house on the hotplate), and broccoli salad. We all ate together for a
change; it was nice. Worked on the Archives and got things closer to some kind
of order. Especially on my “real life business” file and a file bringing the
BoS materials together. Found a few stray fortune cookie fortunes. Dead Ready!
3/28/2020: Woke up about
2:30 AM. Caught up on Diary. Perhaps this will be a new schedule: up at night
to work, then about 11 AM nap, then afternoon family concerns until after
supper, then entertainment until about 11 PM, then another nap (for I cannot call
it sleep). Dreaming about the clean, orderly, physical heft of my writing,
printed out in neat binders. New ambition: get the files on the computer into a
neat, print-ready form. Laid down again about 5 AM.
Up at about 8 AM. Looked in my shoebox pictures and found cache of “Last
Picture of the Year” drawings and put them with the others. I think I need to
borrow one of those garage sale tables for a while to make a really thorough
sorting. Wrote more on “A Stranger You Haven’t Met”, incorporating much Seguinite
lore. After a brief ransack of the kitchen closet (which ended up in better
order) I found I had put the fortunes up in a tin in the cabinet over the sink,
so I was able to add those 3 I found. Try to remember this! No omelet this
morning so I made myself some ramen (with a bun – those buns Susan gave me
Thursday). Looking in the shoebox of drawings in the Archive I found more Last
Drawings and put them together with the others. When I ran a couple of bags of
trash out, I found it was dripping with rain, but not too bad, and cooler. Now
it’s almost 11 AM, and what shall I do? I feel like organizing; maybe I don’t
need the table. And there’s always computer files.
So I went to the clothes
closet, took out the bin, and found enough space for the shirts from Pop’s
little dresser, which freed up 3 drawers – put cards from the Archives into the
Christmas Card Box – and put tote bags into the little fridge drawer. Makes
everything look neater if nothing else. Just rescued a toad out of the
kiddie pool at 11:30 AM and got him out of the Rotts’ reach.
Rosary by 12 noon.
About 3 PM called in to make
tacos, and we ate at 4 PM. Andy’s been mowing most of the afternoon (the rain
having cleared up). Now 8 PM and I wonder if they’ll want anything for supper
or just eat leftovers. Making tiny obsessive straightenings all day.
So, no cooking supper.
Dithered a bit, and then went to bed.
Notes
I've been rather jealous of the 'moosh' of five years ago: this has been an uncomfortably dry year so far. We just had another German chocolate cake for Andy's birthday; some traditions persist. 'Dead Ready' was an old goal: to have everything in place and organized in case I dropped dead.
I was really on fire with new ideas at the time and the will to implement them; no doubt on a high from getting AGODP published and anxiety over the Covid situation. 'When a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.' - Samuel Johnson.
There are two seasons that always move me to cleaning and 'straightening'; Fall and Spring. That's when I'm prone to an overhaul of things that have grown rather slipshod over time.
Just found out that my grand-niece Julia has been born, at 12:50 AM, weighing 7 pounds 9 ounces and 20 and 1/4 inches long. Huzzah!
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