I don’t know; I kind of love rivers. Can you have too many? One of my favorite things about driving south to Mobile through Alabama is all the rivers and marsh you have to cross over; kind of like how you cannot leave New Orleans without crossing a bridge1. I think my affinity for rivers has to do with my love of history; civilization depending on rivers for millennia. Would there have been an Egypt without the Nile? Babylon or Ur without the Tigris and Euphrates? Paris without the Seine? London without the Thames? The North American rivers had a lot to do with the conquest of the continent and its colonialization, too–the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri all were major thoroughfares for movement and shipping. I sometimes wonder if the home county was settled because of the Sipsey River, which drains into the Tombigbee. (It eventually drains into the Mobile River in the marshes north of the city that I mentioned earlier.)
It’s Monday morning and back to the office with me. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I would have liked yesterday but I also don’t mind. The rest felt marvelous, and I stretched to alleviate the muscle tightness from working out Saturday. Physically, I felt pretty good most of the day, and again had some trouble falling asleep last night, but eventually I did and slept very deeply and well. It’s forty degrees out there this morning (yikes!), so it’s going to be a layers day (the office is always cold) and I am going to try to run errands after work on the way home. Today is an Admin day, and I am pretty much current on everything, I think. There are some things I absolutely will need to do today, but it should be an easy one. Sparky kind of wants me to go sit in my chair so he can curl up in my lap, but alas, Spark; it is not to be today, at least not until I get home from the office tonight. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble falling asleep tonight, though. I miss my warm bed already!
Paul was out most of the day yesterday getting tattoos, and he didn’t get home until late. I was watching the Golden Globes, which was kind of dull, actually; as I’ve gotten older I’ve lost interest in awards shows (I used to enjoy the Golden Globes more when everyone got drunk). There are so many now, to the point where the Oscars are so predictable there’s not any point to even rooting for someone, or being very vested in it. I did read for a little while, wrote and cleaned for a little while, and basically just spent the day relaxing and resting from going to the gym on Saturday. My muscles feel a bit fatigued still–which could be frustrating, if I let it be; I practically did hardly anything, compared to the workouts I used to do back in the day–but I’m also a lot older and had to recover from surgery for over a year. Today I feel like getting it together–my life, my shit, my everything–so hopefully that will be my mindset going forward from now on. I’ll still have lazy days, of course–my tendency to be lazy always overrides everything else when I let it happen–but I no longer berate myself when I do so. That’s kind of nice.
It’s also Twelfth Night, which signals the opening of Carnival season for 2025. It’s also the four year anniversary of the insurrection that tried to overthrow the 2020 election; I will never forgive the voters for signing off on pardons for everyone who attacked the Capitol that day. I’ve tried writing about how that felt, to sit at work and watch the horror unfold, wondering if this was ushering in a new authoritarian government and the end of anything decent in this country (that’s right, MAGA, y’all are indecent people as well as traitors); as Paul and I say to each other on an almost daily basis–“thank God we’re old.” I can’t imagine how bleak it must be to be young now and to have absolutely no hope for the future. I will be stopping on the way home from work to get our first king cake, and I am sure someone will bring one into work; it’s a thing, you know, but since the season is so long this year I am sure we’ll get bored with king cake long before Fat Tuesday. We will be having Carnival despite the terrorist attack; “won’t bow, don’t know how” is our attitude down here, and we always hold our heads high even in the midst of tragedy. We had Carnival (abbreviated, but we still had it) after Katrina, and it was so cathartic; it remains to this day one of my favorite Carnivals.
And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Twelfth Night, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; stranger things have indeed happened.
- The bridges of New Orleans is a very fascinating subject, and they have an insane history involving so much bribery, corruption, and incompetence that it’s amazing that somehow, miraculously, they managed to get the job done. ↩︎
Queer and Loathing in America 