New Year's Eve 2006

I can't believe that it's the end of 2006 already. Time seems to have seriously warped this year. Somehow, I got lost between April and November. It seems as if summer was completely swallowed, perhaps because I was teaching so much. But it does seem strange--all Fall I've been thinking "What happened to the summer?"

II think there are several other reasons. One, I really lost Mondays due to the 6 hour teaching schedule, which absolutely obliterates a whole day and also destroys the rhythm of the week. I just feel out of kilter the remaining days. Two, it was a cold and wet soccer season, the first in years, so another rhythm was disrupted. Third, it got cold, too cold, too early in November. December has been temperate, but hideously overcast, and so as the days have shrunk down we have had far too little sun. The last six weeks the days have been monotonous, unforgivingly short, and dreary.

BUt I have accepted a new job, it begins in two days, so tomorrow is my last day in the odd interregnum between teaching and administrating. I have spent the last two weeks trying to prepare myself, bolster myself for the transition, but I've done so out of a holistic intellectual sense, downloading tons of ideas about leadership without the burden of discrete goals. All of this prep work ends tomorrow, and I enter my new skin, my new being, my new title, on Tuesday. Tuesday, 9 am. Until then, I am still in the interegnum.

I think the main person I need to convince is myself. It will become a reality on Tuesday.

Odd. Odd to take over in mid year, odd to start the new calendar year which such a vastly different position. Odd to be so isolated from the position, and then to suddenly step into it. I haven't experienced this kind of career shift in over twenty years. The challenge for me is to find a new way to do the job and to grow with it without being consumed, to find a way to do it without being overwhelmed, and to preserve time and energy for myself. I need to read and write for myself, retain my identity as I change my identity.

Who and what do I want to be?

ONE EYE BLIND

Several nights ago I dreamt that I had lost my right eye. I dreamt it early in the night and then pursued a string of dreams, all loosely connected, and in each dream, each shift of scene and context, the only thing that remained constant was that I was myself and I had lost my eye.

It happened almost by accident. I seem to remember being accidentally raked, or scratched, as if in jest, and feeling a terrific stinging sensation in my face, and then a numbness, an emptiness, and as my mind cleared I slowly realized something had happened. I retraced my steps, and sure enough, there, in the gutter (where? Pittsburgh? some foreign city with dingy streets, cinders along the curb), I found a white blob in an oily shallow puddle on the asphalt, misshapened, more like a milky opalesence, like an imperfect white chocoalte caramel one might find in a Whitman Sampler, wrinkled on top like a prune. It seemed clean and otherwise unscathed, with a spray of optic nerve springing out like a from the night street. I admired it, standing over it, admired it with deep wonder, but when I stoped down to pick it up a stranger running by in the night suddenly splashed along the gutter and stepped on it, splat, and in a dull pucker it flattened, and I knew my history as a bifocal man had abruptly ended. It was then that I reached up for the first time to touch my face, gingerly, tenderly seeking its home, and it was sensitive, an almond-shaped pocket, the lid had somehow closed over the socket hole and formed a smooth fleshy bowl foormed by a thumb. I was not bleeding or ooozing puss or black venous bile, there was no gaping hole in my head leading to my brain, it was as if I'd been born to have this stone fall from its place and heal.

All night I moved from scene to scene, explaining to others what had happened, or lamenting the fact that I was now one-eyed, telling them that the life I once knew, the person I once was, was over. I was a one-eyed man, I had lost something terribly important, my soul, and if they would only look and pay attention for one moment they might put together the fact that I was a bit harried and disoriented--after all, I'd just been seriously, egregiously injured, and they seemed not to care a bit, the whole story caught them off-guard yet even son, disinterested.

All night I seeemd to look for my eye, recognize its absence, explain its occurrence, as if it were the most compelling story I could conjure and each time people seemed to stare at me as if in askance, otherwise preoccupied--not unsympathetic, but freed from any emotion. It was my hole, my lack, my pain, my need to account for my missing eye, and despite my best efforts, northing measured up.

The brutal fact was, I had lost an eye and I must now move on as if unconscious of the impact.

And yet I knew this loss was my soul, a dark star cooling, this was a deep psychic wound, a scar, an emptiness I could never fill.

I woke up as I used to wake up from such painless yet traumatic dreams iny late teens: stunned, scared, cold, resigned, angry, unable to expresss my feeling, my loss. As if the very fact of living meant suffering these kinds of psychic losses, that the self beneath the mask was slowly deteriorating, decaying, losing itself to the world or masks and appearances.

Jesus

Christ it snowed a lot last night.

A foot of snow.

BURIED

Lately....

So lately I've been pretty stable knock on wood.

No real rollercoaster swings or screaming dives just even steven every day just waking up going about my business not rushing or hurrying getting things done and maintaining a steady eddy pace

I'm just getting over some brutish flu that morphed into bronchitis slept on the TV sofa head upright but barely slept I think I've spent 5 nights of the last 8 ensconced on the paralyzing sofa racking my skull my head and neck bones aching coughing fits that last 20 minutes

been sick 8 days

today is the first day I've felt fairly normal woke up at 9 well-rested and no head full of crap and the windows glowed white overnight it had snowed a foot and bigod that meant a day of shoveling and running the snowblower and tonight I hope to get on the bike and ride for a while and get some exercise jesus I haven't been able to do anything for over a week

so now it's winter the world is covered in snow snow heaps everywhere and tonight it's below 20 and it's not supposed to get above 30 for a week so we're gonna be socked in walled in by snow for a while but it's nice to have a spate of cold it kills off some of the vile germs spreading around and it gives you a chance to wear sweaters and sweatshirts

Gotta use the light box everyday now we've been visited by a maelstrom of dark turbid days and the sun's down by four if it's ever out but the last two weeks have been awful dark and penetratingly oppressive

Lost my red gloves on the fucking bus yesterday meaning I've lost 2 pair in the past month