Jingle Jangle Morning

Some mornings you wake up & there is the nearly teleological beauty of the blueness of the sky & motes of dust in the sun & birds & squirrels chickling in the trees & you have a bag full of books & free time to read them & it’s warm but not too warm & sunny but not excruciatingly so. Excited for coffee. Delirious with potential. Half-smiles from strangers. Friends honking as they drive by.

Today I woke up with the word penis written on the back of my hand. I knew how it got there in the sense that I in no way forgot Deirdre’s silly elementary-school joke about the Pen 15 club, but in another sense how did it get there? How is it that I can wake up one morning in February with the word penis written on my hand?

Walking back from having soup with Ben & Kaleb the winter sunlight knifed everything into surreal. I noticed that there were a lot of freaky people around—more than usual. Limping & muttering to themselves. Sweatpants & strangely oversized stocking caps. Missing teeth & slippers. For the whole walk every person I saw seemed like an extra from a zombie film, but not the zombies. These were people the early part of the film in which the director sets the scene of normality as itself skewed by overemphasizing the extremes of human physicality and frailty.

And of course I was in the mix, so I had to accept that however freaky I might find these people I am one of them. Any definition of freakiness I might apply to them would in fact be a projection of my own state. And it was an apt reflection of my feeling of being in the world just then. It was as if casting had sent in a group of people to mirror my inner mode.

My favorite part of No Direction Home was when Dylan is talking about why he changed his surname and says something to the effect of "It wasn't for any the reasons that I've read about."