shots on goal

An unconventional day up here in fortress PK.

I was supposed to go to work today. Expected to. Got up at 7, went through the usual morning routine, and then boxed up the cat to take her to get fixed and get shots. Spent a little over an hour at my neighborhood vet, which seems like a really good place. It came with excellent recommendations. I was kind of wound-up about it; I've had quite a few pets but never actually had to take one to get it fixed. Once I got her in the box and she settled down, she was a trooper. She's spending the night there...poor thing.

Checked in with work; they didn't need me today. Came home feeling blessed for having a day off I didn't expect, attended to one studio-related job (applying polyurethane to the window stops), fielded a few phone calls and accepted a very small writing job with a deadline of tonight (just finished it half an hour ago) and then found myself incapable of deciding how I should use the remainder of the day.

And then it hit me: I'm tired of feeling like I've got to work every single day on this or that task. The studio works (although some work remains to be done...at my leisure), I already have an inaugural tune in progress, there's no urgency anymore, I was in a weird mood, and decided that I wanted to read.

So I read and finished Ignorance.

I haven't had a day this completely good and right in a long time. Because of that; because of the book.

If you didn't read it before (and I don't blame you if you didn't!), skip to the fifth and sixth paragraphs of this.

That feeling applies here. How it does.

I'm too close to it to describe or analyze it. I wouldn't even want to try. All I could do afterwards was go sit outside and look at the dark, still, night sky and look at the few stars that poked through the ultramarine blue and feel very...very...I dunno...just right. Like something in this world makes perfect sense.

And now, a day that was fraught with indecision now feels like a gift.

There's one beautiful problem I have when I read Kundera. Frequently, while reading his books, and particular observations in them--often, one of his playful, authorial intrusions, my mind spins off at light speed out into a universe of ideas, a universe that pours into his novels (and essays) with joyful abandon. It can be so hard to keep my eyes trained on the text. Few pages go by without this happening; my imagination sent wildly adrift, my mind weighing and testing his assertions. It's a wonderful thing. His ability to tether a musicological debate on the merits of Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky to an integral piece of information about a character while simultaneously inserting himself into the narrative is priceless. The way he'll mary a mathematical conceit describing age-dependent experience as a ratio of the average human life span and how that lifespan limits our ability to travel very far in space to a plot point sparkles with wit and intelligence. And it is never at the expense of the narrative itself, always in service of it.

As for the mystery (tenth paragraph down)? Still unsolved. No...wait. Only partly unsolved. I know now that I never finished this book. But I do still know too that I very much did read those first thirty or forty pages. And I still don't know where or how, and if I bought the hardback, and if I left it somewhere back east, or on a plane, unfinished.