Hurry

It's going to be brute force for a while; forcing the solitude. Slowly, as if moving a huge weight, I close the laptop. At some point the mechanism (which I've never discovered) engages: the light clicks off when its face is an inch or two from its chest. It doesn't want to go. Beyond hearing, it keens and moans. It summons the dead, and they cluster behind me. How can you shut down the whole breathing world? What will be left if you do? A full hour later than I'd planned; now I am going to hurry to get my evening things done, setting up hurry for tomorrow morning, hurry for the day, hurry for evening, hurrying forever and never getting anywhere. Stop, you've got to stop, you old fool!

I woke this morning to surprising light. "The moon must be nearly full," I thought. I padded through the half-lit house -- I never turn on lights first thing in the morning, if I can help it -- and went to the window. There was a gleam in the cloud cover to the west: as I watched the full moon's disk slide into ghostly view, and recede again. It was gone, but the whole flannel of the western sky was soaked in moonlight. I could see well enough to start my day. Still: compromised by last night's hurry. Today will be hurried and incomplete, like all the other days. For God's sake stop, Dale. Get a grip.

But I hurried again to get ready, left my morning stretches and breathing undone, scrambled to get out of the house before the morning traffic. If I leave at 7:00 it takes ten minutes to get to Tom's; if I leave at 7:15 it takes half an hour. Long enough for even an aged fool, wagging his beard at the steering wheel, to realize that driving like this is madness, participating in the bonfire.

But it's the only piece of reality I have hold of, these mornings; I'm not going to loosen my clutch on it. I can sit there and work two hours. Real work. The rest of my day dissolves in a meaningless ebb and flow of hurry and avoidance, one driving inevitably to the other, both pushing toward a mindless stupor. Yeah. Whatever I was born for, it was not for this. 

I must go at it blind, my fingertips searching for any unevenness that might give purchase. I'm not special; I'm not alone. We're all doing this. You can hear the rattling buzz of the snare drum, if you listen for it; the beat of money pulsing through the economy, of coffee pulsing through the veins. It has its own agenda. Its fingers are delicately searching in turn for my weaknesses. Its fingers are not as strong as mine: but there are more of them, and they never rest.