There is not much doubt from your perspective: a day well spent is a day spent writing well. But it is also a given that a day writing miserably, writing in the absolute conviction that you'll have produced no pages worth saving, is a day still better spent than not writing at all.
The fulcrum here, possibly even the culprit, is muscle memory. MM is the culprit who has you doing IT rather than other things that might have turned out to be more fun, or at least doing IT for enough of the day to satisfy the inner workings to the point where there are neither regrets nor recriminations.
This is all prologue to events of about six this morning in which your early thoughts were of pleasant anticipation at the thoughts of the Friday morning coffee klatch with longtime friends. As you stood in the bathroom, draining yourself, it was as though some unseen assailant had entered behind you and delivered a rabbit punch. There was no other person but you; you may never know the exact nature of the assailant but nevertheless it had you tumbled across the floor, landing with a smart thump on the entry ledge to the stall shower. Not a pleasing thing for your ribs. On the floor and in some state of disarray, you heard another clatter which later proved to have been caused by the cat, frightened by your own collapse, jumping onto the spice shelf, in many ways as bad a move for her and several bottles as hitting your ribs on the shower ledge was for you.
Somehow you managed your faint-headed, by now sweaty person back to your bed where you flung yourself to sleep fitfully until nearly noon, awakened by the awareness that regardless of what the cause of your sudden spurt of stability, you needed to begin thinking about what you would discuss right here in this very template. It took another nap for you to make the connection that whatever your assailant, it was not forceful enough to knock you away from the need to render these paragraphs.
Some hours later, the ribs sitting up and begging as it were for a few aspirin, you were at your customary place, finishing a review that was due today, then attending to this. It comes as measurable satisfaction to be doing this now, but it will come as even more measurable later, when you are scrolling through these notes and questions and reminders and remonstrations: on this day, which had high potential for being a day well spent writing well, it became instead a day where doing this added to your sense of recovering from whatever it was you needed to recover from.
Part of you will say, in this indistinct future when you examine these scrolls for artifacts from which to construct larger edifices, Big deal; you made a big deal about getting some sentences down. But you will be able to counter: No; that wasn't the matter at all. The matter was that you do what you profess to do, rain or shine, alert or dizzy, for you and all the world to see, as though either you or the world had any interest.
The part of this worth keeping is the fact of it having been done at all and the unknowable, unseen effect muscle memory will have on future days.
P.S. The cat scored a bottle of turmeric powder, a jar of cloves, another of star anise, and something rather murky looking you'd no doubt been keeping in some sentimental esteem.
Friday, August 13, 2010
More Muscle Memory, Particularly around the Ribs
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1 comment:
Hmmm... Adventures abound, even in ones own bathroom. I hope that your ribs recover, and that whatever caused the event is something transitory. Take care of yourself, dear friend.
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