what I refuse to say.
And I have nothing else I want to say in public about related matters.
I had my first week of work. The three people I work with are excellent. Intellectual heavyweights, light at heart. I am grossly unqualified to make decisions. Bratwurst played a role in my decision to throw up in the chambers bathroom on Wednesday. We hired people to replace us. One hire is demographically similar to me, only better in every respect, such as grades, life experience, and personality. I underestimated my responsibilities; what I thought was an intraoffice memo was read into the transcript as American law on Friday. The first opinion I have to write is an art law case. The question is: is the garden art or merely landscaping? I may actually use what I learned in my last semester of law school for this one. The hours are long, but it's not like I have anything better to do. So long as I get my half hour of exercise and hour of art and hour of reading and hour of writing in my journal after work and before bed, I'll be fine. The subway is, like the NOFX concert I attended in 1997, filled with other people's elbows and bad attitudes. Alternatively, the bike ride is sweaty and I come to the courthouse with my clothes looking like Barbara Walters' unaltered face. My brain will be better at the end of the year, but it begins the year baffled by everything: a new comforter, the economy, the meanings of Latin phrases, future prospects, futurity generally. Louis called on Sunday to say he was coming to Chicago on Monday, and stayed with me for five days and cheered me up with his babble. I spent some time alone, and some time with friends, and some time underwater.
Friends say: fresh start! But when I want to be dramatic, I tell myself I've lost everything I once had: all my possessions, shipped stupidly via USPS during Hurricanes Gustav, Hannah, and Ike, have disappeared from even the online tracking system; my dog is somewhere with someone I don't know; my lover has left me, not in any of the fifty ways I've heard of lovers leaving; and like Emmylou, I'm sixteen hundred miles from the people I know. All these pieces will come back to me, although today I refused to spend $16 on a scarf that I know I will need soon, because I still believe that one day my boxes will come. This is one way to cope, and I am applying this to deal with the rest of this terrifying adventure of starting over with no friends in a brand new city, which is to say, I am coping via denial. There is also an aspiration for the rest of the year. Let us call it the Prairie School of life management. It involves open plans, horizontality, natural materials, and a frontier spirit. The woman with whom I play guitar tells me that her witch psychic and her Reiki healer ("Lucien," for light) both tell her let her love for herself take precedence over her desire to be loved by others. Looking in a mirror, she taps herself on the chest with her fist and says, "I love you," to her heart. I'm going to try it once I leave this cafe.
I am sitting in Starbucks leaving salty splotches on the front of my shirt, and it's now the third time the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" is playing on the radio. Some java jockey loves himself some Black Francis.
It was the last day of the summer today. High seventies and clear blue sky, except a fog and filthy air hovering over the tallest buildings in the Loop. I ran two miles down Division to the lake, then up the lakefront path to Fullerton, where I dropped my shorts and my shirt and ran into the water with a set of goggles on my head. Yesterday I looked into the water off the edge of a pier near Burnham Park and the lake was so clear and light you could see perfectly the giant brioche rocks six feet under the surface of the water, but today in Lincoln Park the water was cloudly and my goggles were useless. I swam out to the gulls sitting on a line of posts about a hundred yards out, then bobbed on my back looking at the triangles sailing on the horizon. It's strange to be in a body of freshwater as big as Lake Michigan. Ebola levels were acceptable today, I learned later. I hooked a dog's harness with my toe and brought it back to the shore. It was a nice way to spend an afternoon.
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