Floating in a winter wonderland

Bette Midler "Angst on a shoestring"

"Counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all, playing solitaire 'til dawn with a deck of fifty-one, smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo, now don't tell me, I've nothin' to do …"   Flowers on the Wall – The Statler Brothers. 

Some days it feels like that, like when the biggest accomplishment is moving more firewood from the stacks in the woods to refill the rack just outside the door.

Temperatures floating in the single digits on either side of zero discourage more than a few minutes endured outside even when the sun is shining. Once in a while the temptation hits and a foray to photograph the birds in the yard breaks up the monotony. But even with those: I'm pretty sure I am looking at the same dozen chickadees and the same dozen grosbeaks day after day. Our conversations grow stale for lack of fresh input. There's a larger bird lurking in the back-side woods but not ever where he could be identified or photographed.

You read of old people isolated in their living quarters and wasting away in dingy brownstone apartments, and have to wonder. An idea for something to write about comes and then flees; who would want to read about that anyway, or care what I have to say about it, or, gees, that's a year's commitment at least.

A search through the refrigerator uses some time, not looking for food, looking for something I'm running out of for an excuse to drive into town, my exchange with the woman at the checkout the only interaction with another human being this week.

Then a bowl of soup and nap and it's time for Rachel Maddow, the gateway into the night's prime time but only to watch shows of secondary interest because the good ones are being recorded to watch later when sleep doesn't come in the night. Reading holds no appeal; all it does is add to the creative malaise the idle computer broadcasts into the room.

Sun crosses the southern sky showing briefly in the morning over the mountains to the east, then slipping behind the big mountain in the front yard only to emerge again in late afternoon to cast light and shadows across the yard for about an hour.

More interesting are the moonshadows in the evening as a waxing moon lights the night sky so brightly most of the detail in the yard is discernible and sparkles highlight the snow. Then there's the curiosity about what activated the motion-sensing lights, what critter wandered past their electronic eyes and turned them on. New tracks would tell the tale but that's too much of an effort to find out it's only the neighbor's black cat making his rounds and crossing my path several times in the process.

The opening line in that Statler Brothers song is "I keep hearing you're concerned about my happiness …" and I wonder, at times even tempted to post in the Craigslist missed-connections section for that far-off city on the odd chance the statement is true. So far it remains a temptation, but wording floats through the mind now and then, each time rejected in the silliness the thought provokes. Still there is the last line in the last dream, "From now on it's just us," in two-part harmony.

As for words, the tendrils of that novel reach out from every nook and ravine among the pixels  this computer generates. attempting to entwine me in its milieu again, just as the subject of it often entangles me in chats on the same computer. I knew it was difficult writing going in, but eventually it became discouraging and fell by the wayside. Still the tendrils and the woman alternately fill me with optimism and guilty regret but neither the tentacles nor the entreaties can entice me into the plot enough to sit and actually write something.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the Statler Brothers' song. He thought it was about divorce. Maybe so, but I don't, although divorce could be one reason a man sits lonely in a room contemplating flowers on wallpaper or the birds at the feeder just outside the window. In one lifetime we all collect a number of people who conceivably could be out there somewhere concerned about our happiness, just as we at times must be concerned or at least think about the happiness of someone in our own pasts. Maybe we ought to give those people a little more thought and perhaps in that thought is redemption. Meanwhile those flowers and those birds have a lot in common, mesmerizing, hypnotic, sculpting a person into granite inaction.

And as Peggy Lee sang so beautifully, "if that's all there is, let's keep on dancing, break out the booze and have a ball." Maybe tomorrow.

It's OK to be an introvert as long as you keep it to yourself