Snow

Excerpt from a letter to the lovely Ceir:

It’s been an odd day. The elements are warring with each other in Washington; driving to work was like traveling across a checkerboard, where the black squares were clear sunshine and the white squares were snow/sleet/rain. Throughout my shift I’d gaze out the library windows–we have tons–and watch the outside world metamorphose from one state to another.  At times, it was like being caught in a snow globe, watching the snowflakes fall on the dirt, whitening it like a poor attempt at color-by-numbers. I’d walk by a window ten minutes later, and the sky would be bright, only the wet glistening of water drops on each blade of glass, no snow to be seen. Just now, a long time after beginning this, I walked outside and found that the snow had finally won out. On the hood of my car, the snow had formed in the most peculiar pattern–that of a tree in full bloom. I took a snapshot with my phone, but I’m afraid it won’t come out. I’m going to try and put it up on OD tomorrow, as I’m too tired at the moment to do so.

A peculiar day of weather, but somewhat enchanting.

I hate when I reread something I wrote and see that I used the same adjective (in this case, peculiar) twice in the span of a couple of sentences. Ah well, that’s what I get for writing when I’m tired. Also, now that I look at the picture today, I still see the tree, but also recognize it could be a mushroom cloud, which amuses my darker side greatly.

I’m feeling much better. My quarantine lasted only a couple of days; astonishingly, I healed rapidly, to the surprise of myself and co-workers. Saturday, I thought my suffering would be eternal. Sunday was a bad day, decent night. Monday, I woke up surprisingly good except for some residual congestion. Go figure. I don’t know whether to attribute it to luck or my dedication to health and fitness since the end of last year. Regardless, I’m grateful.

In addition to working hard on my fantasy baseball drafts–which takes hours of preparation spread over a couple of weeks–I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Prozac Nation. It’s always been a personality quirk of mine to initially go against the grain and eschew what everyone else likes. I hadn’t read it earlier precisely because it was hugely popular and made into a movie. As I’ve grown older, I’ve broken free from that need to be different, for lack of a better phrase or description, but it still manifests itself in my entertainment choices. 24 is a brilliant show, but I didn’t start watching it until this season. Why? Because everyone else was watching it.  That doesn’t mean I criticize it or ridicule people who do watch it. Not at all. It just means I hate being like everyone else. I’m sure if I spent enough time typing about it, I’d be able to psychoanalyze it into something more crystalline and specific, but I’m not going to do that right now.

I am working on the next part of the Laura saga, however, and I also want to share a number of quotes from Prozac Nation. Like, a large number. That’s a good sign of how much I like it, and relate to it. If I ever wrote a book, I’m sure it’d be something along those lines. I’ll share one here that I read just an hour ago at IHOP over banana-pecan pancakes.  It resounded poignantly.

No one in Dallas really cares about me. I’m a stranger in town and on earth. No matter how I tell myself I am familiar with this place, it isn’t true.  I’m a stranger wherever I go because I’m strange to myself. My mind just goes off doing its own thing, never consulting me at all about whether it’s all right to feel this way or that. I am constantly standing several feet away from myself, watching as I do or say or feel something that I don’t want or don’t like at all, and still I can’t stop it.  The closest I get to keeping myself in line is when I drink.  With enough wine, I can even sleep at night. I wonder what I will have to do to convince some medical doctor that I am really and truly imbalanced, that there’s no other explanation for the way my head feels all the time, for the way I feel like one of those souvenir plastic domes that are full of glitter which you get at Disney World or at truck stops, the kind that makes snow when you turn it over. That’s what it’s like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts–blizzards, cyclones.  I am the fucking Wizard of Oz. I can’t go on like this much longer. Why won’t any of the doctors help me? I’ve gone to so many, and they all say, You need love. Or, You need to talk this through. Don’t they see that all their advice may be well intentioned but in the meantime I’m falling, I know it, I am.