Glare

Pondering forgiveness: and finding that the first step is to draw up the bill of attainder. If I were to forgive, what would I be forgiving?

Blue sky, the awnings pitching and flapping in the wind. A cold, bright, ugly day, with ice on the wind. Sunlight falls on my right shoulder, on my ear, and on the blond hair of my cocked head: I keep scooting down the bench to avoid it. Threatened with sunburn, in January!

Panic slowly rising. I don't want to think about this. About any of it.

But soft. This is only the racketing of a bright winter day, only the uneasiness of a burrowing creature brought abruptly into the sunlight. I squirm and nuzzle for a weakness in the earth, for a thrusting place for my snout. My star-nosed cousins, you know, can find out far more by groping with their tendril-blossomed snouts than you will ever be able to see with your great lemur eyes. There are realms below the clotted grass roots that you'll never know, not the way we know them: where the judder of an earthworm sends a whisper down a dozen branching galleries, and a footfall slams like roundshot against earthworks.

I am more demoralized, more afraid, than I can remember since the bad old days of IBM. I'm not sure what it's made of, but I know I have to slow down, way down, become deliberate and – to borrow my own word – dogged. I need to to make a list of the five main projects I'm working on, boiled down to single sentences, and be able to say which of those things each thing I'm working on is in service of. Because I suspect I've sold myself into service of something or someone else. Careful here. Careful. Whatever you do, don't hurry, don't shy, don't skip. If you run it only draws the predators. Step by step. Life is elsewhere, maybe, but that doesn't matter right now.