It’s 5:56 pm. I’m on my 2406 step of the day according to my iPhone. It’s 90 degrees. I’m listening to the Audible recording of the 25th anniversary edition of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
Passover begins in eight days, so I’ll have lots of face to face contact then. No need to push myself tonight to go to yoga or to a 12-step meeting or to a Torah class or to a meetup or to a sports bar or to some awkward friend or acquaintance thing. I have my books and my poetry to protect me.
I see some awkward people ahead and so I take a sudden right and go past five Mexican tree trimmers sitting in the shade. I nod.
Up ahead is a young girl handing over a robot bag of her stuff to a 40-something fat guy behind a Prius. A young woman walks up to the kid trailed by another fat guy. I wonder what would happen if I merged with this woman, if my life merged with hers and we ended up looking after the kids together and having the in-laws over and my time would be no longer my own, I’d just be another dad. I smell her deodorant and it is familiar, I’ve smelt it dozens of times before when I’ve been normal and it smells like mediocrity.
Related posts:
* The road to recovery
* Our Problems Are Not Our Problems, They’re Just Symptoms Of Deeper Problems
* With or without you
* I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help
* Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless
* Bypass your self-destructive tendencies
* A life that works
* Bringing souls out of hiding
But I won’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive
Papers in the roadside
Tell of suffering and greed
Fear today, forgot tomorrow
Ooh, here besides the news
Of holy war and holy need
Ours is just a little sorrowed talk
