Never what I expect

[I appears that my routines have been upended. Here I am, for the second day in a row writing in the not-evening, after missing a day entirely. And is it morning on the early side and I am the only one up, although for my normal day that's not very remarkable. If it weren't, THAT would be remarkable.]

I like the light in the morning and the feeling of alertness it instantly bestows on me when I wake up as a direct result. For several weeks at school I have managed to wake up before my alarm every day simply because I have been in bed early enough and the sun has decided to shine instead of hiding in clouds. Today is cloudy, but bright which is as good a compromise as you can get, and the result is much the same. I yawn but am awake, happy to be so, and the peace of the morning is found in the gentle hiss of the radiator, the muted clanging of the train, the dull thunk of the keys as I strike them. If I listen carefully I can hear either birds or someone else's radiator squealing in the distance and the odd dripping and lumping noises of the humidifier - like a cross between a meditation garden fountain and the air bubble explosion you get from water coolers every once in a while. I want to describe every feature of these few minutes I have by myself for reflection today, preserve the minute detail and sensory perception so I can look back in two weeks and not just remember but be present again. The detritus on the table from two nights of excitement - a plate full of crumbs, a mostly eaten bag of cookies, an empty Chimay bottle (blue label, mind you) three used cups, all different - plastic, glass, ceramic - a receipt and grocery list, a free book, a library book, a folded dirty napkin, the box of Settlers, and Ethan's snoopy hat, perched on its head with the bill pointed towards the window. It looks like a fuzzy open takeout container and I half expect to find some pad thai if I start looking into the cavity. A small expanse of life. As one west coast public radio station says, "morning becomes eclectic". In our case I think it safe to say "table becomes eclectic" as well, although I feel like to ought to through a random picture frame and a piece of sporting equipment down to help justify that description.

I suppose the task over overall description is too vast for this short space and time. I hardly would know where to go to next, or how much to go back and edit, expand, clarify what little I have already. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the main character talks about a student who had trouble writing a paper on a town until she was given a specific brick in a specific building to talk about as a starting point. Otherwise there were too many options. I approach this writing in the same way. Often when I sit down I have been thinking for several minutes what to say since there are usually plenty of things I have been thinking about - at school there is never shortage of time for extemporaneous thought - but rarely do I produce anything remotely like my intentions. I sit and start to think of how to begin and everything seems forced and strained or bland (how many entries can I start with "tonight,..."?). So in the end I seize upon a sentence - generally the first one the comes into my head fully formed, some sort of grammatical Athene, and I springboard off it and try to keep going. This is how I ended up today on mornings and dirty tables instead of the anticipation of the day's activities or my feeble but exciting attempt to play again after at least a year completely off. That is surely worth an entry, but perhaps another day those words will flow. I wouldn't go so far to say that I am engaged in some sort of surrealist form of writing or a true stream of consciousness but to a certain extent (as cheesy as this sounds) my topic chooses itself. Once I fall in love with a sentence, I can hardly give it up for something as silly as a proscription.