Waiting for Inspiration

"I'm going to work out and I'm going to clean the place, but first I'm going to goof off," I said. To FFP, of course, because usually if I'm not talking to myself then I'm talking to him. I had trouble sleeping last night. We got home around nine after taking my dad on an excursion. His dear friends had invited us all over for a lamb dinner. We went early and installed and tested his new Lifeline equipment. His old phone died of alcohol overdose. (Shorted out from a beer spill.) We watched a little TV with him and then took off for the meal and visit. We all enjoyed it, I think, in our own way. Anyway, we dropped him off and got back here around nine. We watched some football and then I watched a recording of The Simpsons that dovetailed with the NY Times Sunday Magazine crossword. Yeah, no kidding. What fun.

I read newspapers and dozed a few times but then I ended up messing around with the equations for an answer to Marilyn vos Savant's column in Parade. (Yeah, I read Parade, too. I'm not proud of it.) Is that a made-up name? Like the 'geniuses' at Apple? Anyway, algebra. I miss math sometimes. My eyes got bleary. I went to the computer, discovered an error had occurred on something I wanted to write customer support about, posted my Austin Daily Photo blog. I wondered is my monitor was getting fuzzy. My eyese were fuzzy. It was late, late. Went to bed.

I got up this morning thinking I needed to clean, work out and to work on a friend's WEB page that I foolishly volunteered to create some while ago. She is coming by to visit this afternoon and had sent a bunch of e-mails over the last few weeks about updates she wanted. I had to track them down. It felt like 'work.'

So I'm not cleaning. I'm not working out. I'm, well, you know, blogging! And drinking coffee. Because that's what I feel like doing.

Yesterday we walked over to Z'Tejas for brunch. I was reading Marcel Bénabou's Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books and he waxes eloquently about trying to write without the reflection and 'story within a story' and metaphor that is, well, literature:

I dreamed of a book in which one would take everything in its simplest, most immediately revealed sense....A book whose structure would, in its simplicity, have no inkling of resorting to drawers within drawers; a book from which any kind of mirror would be banished, in which one would search in vain for the least surface able to reflect the image of objects; in short, a book that would allow itself none of the facile effects of mise en abîme and specular games.

Now, apart from never having heard 'mise en abîme' and not knowing the meaning of specular, I know mirrors and reflections so when we left I went to Portnoy's nearby and took several reflection pictures as above. [And later looked up the mystery phrase and word. Cool.]

And my point was? I don't know. Just displacing. Did I mention I've worked the crossword in the NY Times? And watched as some workmen messed with the water and chilled water meters in my mechanical closet? So, the day is disappearing. And I really must do something useful.