Written on 09/01/20.

Today I tried to start over again, just like I do every day. In this case that meant seeing my light alarm flash on at 5 a.m. box with the glitter on it and hearing the bell alarm go off at 5:15. Then stumble past easy chair bathroom. Open the medicine cabinet scissors and honey for pill-popping. This was all very disorienting, like waking up in a room in which the floor had gone slanted overnight. I felt as if I’d been step machine shanghaied and awoken at sea. This is the COVID life making excitement splashes on the mirror of the dreary routine of rising to nothing.

Walking stick meditation rattle the rafters. Bend my head to duck past cave drawing eyes in charcoal. Make the heart beat for the empty day. It is cold even in August so I turn up the heat. Check diary and plan fingers typing so fat for the morning.

The omelet is perfect olives butter onions glass plate coffee of beastliness. By 8:30 I’m at my desk trying to write a sea journey caverns in the deep.

I wish, to tell the truth, I really do wish I could wake up someplace else. The numbness of enforced stay-at-home isolation has transformed my apartment with its carefully selected furniture into a strange and shivery place. I walk about my bedroom and look upon my things like the lava lamp or the pre columbian red clay statue and they seem as foreign as newly discovered stalagmites on a spelunking expedition.

Spelunking describes the sensation I have wandering through these eight rooms with everything I see, even my own face in the bathroom mirror, mysteriously othered. The books on the shelves might just as well have Portuguese on their spines for all they mean to me. The times have made me a foreigner to myself my words like ancient Greek mysterious parchment on the wall by my desk.

I don’t think it’ll be long before I start talking to myself out loud and in the mirror perhaps.

I already talk to the lamps and the easy chair. I want to escape fans in the windows this inverted life inside. America is a madhouse and I am straitjacketed padded cell crazy with flower pots in the studio breathing the smoke from the forest fires.

So. How was YOUR morning?