03.29.07

Yesterday was a bust. It was a mistake to wake up at 6 to help the kids off to school while still feeling the aftereffects of a cold, but it was a mitzvah for the wife. I didn’t realize how much it would take out of me, and by 3 p.m., I was disoriented and unable to concentrate.

Well, as Lily in “Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse” would say, “Today was not very good. Tomorrow will be better.” Strange what one retains from books read to your children. When Michael Palin crossed the International Date Line by container ship in one of his documentaries, the PA announcer told the crew that they would have another October 28 the next day, but that “whatever happened today, will not necessarily happen tomorrow.”

It didn’t help that I had amassed a number of library books, and have two book reviews due. There were also on my desk eight books on China and a number of potential review copies that needed sorting. That night, before settling down to watch the Simpsons season set, I did the most work I had done all day and cleaned up the desk, throwing the library books back (they were impulse acquisitions anyway and of no particular use), and resolving in my mind my goals for today.

If that seems overly deterministic, even mechanical, that’s the way my head works. There may be some people capable of diving into the day’s work, but sometimes I can be as deliberative as a convocation of rabbis deliberating a point of Jewish law. I feel better knowing everything that is on schedule, and then digging down into the task at hand.

Except for the days when my head feels as static-filled as a UHF channel. (Now there’s a simile that will probably never appear again. Broadcast channels rarely end their day anymore at 1 a.m. with the “Star-Spangled Banner” followed by snow on the screen. Once analog channels disappear, we’ll be left with the random clarity of AM radio to describe the brain fuzzies, at least until Congress receives enough campaign contributions to ban broadcasts that are not satellite-sent. Thank heavens most cellphone reception is still crappy; that’ll do.)

Paragraph-long interior monologues; that’s a bad sign for the day’s work. But it’ll have to do. The story has to get pushed along, and if it looks like ten miles of bad road at the end, it’s ten miles longer than the day before, and that’s progress of a short. Remember Anne Lamott’s injunction: “All first drafts are shit” and take heart.