Morning ritual

I dreamt of luscious hotel entrance to my simple apartment. Outside the world at every entrance, the lobby stretched so wide, you could traverse its length and arrive at entirely different neighborhoods and sub-worlds. and this is delightful, the notion of my humble home, the foundation and enclave, wrapped in grandeur, sweeping staircases, marble floors, silver platters, the bustle of a million maids and butlers in well pressed uniforms, a gorgeous big world, with a safe place in its heart. I dash up the stairs endless palace stairs, and i am small again like the little pig character of children's books, like the little girl who lives in the waldorf astoria, the world of beauty is big and i am joyously scurrying. But i must take a regulation staircase, a back way a fire escape i follow a woman, she gets off on four. I must arrive at six, and there is a severance of the staircase, an Escherian optical puzzle. I cannot get to the next floor.

And i wake.

I am in my brother's bed in my childhood house, the walls are plastered thickly with the gleam of sports cars and buxom women lounging upon them. My head is thick with cementing mucus in hidden crevices, weighing my mind and my skin is so dry with desert air it is crackling. There were other dreams, they are ephemera.

The day ahead seems dull. Somewhere in the larger picture progress must be made--on my medical training, on my research. I am short on money, someone at the university has delayed the check until i report my findings. What have I found? I have been meditating that at 28 I am not really a Young Woman anymore. A youngish woman. Long ago already i was Madame over a Mademoiselle, though i have neither married nor reproduced. I have a man i love, he is gently coy about these things. In the mean time, amid the clinic and the wards, the excel spread sheets and nights of sleepy love, the rolling hormonal sine waves keep time on my ovaries, which are in turn neatly bound and chemically gagged with FDA approved contraception.

Men do not generally face their finiteness for decades, but for women it begins at 35, and it begins in the pelvis (all things begin in the pelvis), then radiates outward.

The school counselor accuses me of escape into abstraction in my philosophizing (or perhaps it is i who accuses, and she who nods). The disciples of the mind think there is a different truth, the one that is bound up in the tangles and rolls of the individual psyche, the particulars of the organisms trajectory, of its shapes and deformities, of the particular drag and gravity in its subjective cosmos, and the course of collisions with other creatures. Perhaps each atomized vector can be integrated and an elegant tale can be told, the story (stories) that will predict the future. Like their brethren in physics, the disciples of psyche chase the mystical with the sober pretense of trading in mundane tools.

Oh this poor isolated animal. The French find the isolation inevitable and pitiable, the americans an aspiration and a celebration. I do not want to be alone. Life begins with a expulsion from another. It begins with separation and a life desperate for union again. The end carries the parabola forward to its inevitably lonely conclusion. But after we are gone, the fungi take us back, and we are reunited with all again. Dénouement, resolution, or catastrophe.

Remarkably un-comforting.

Yesterday my heart broke watching an injured bee, journey steadily across the suburban bathroom floor. Why was there a bumble bee in such an inglorious place? (And why do we hate flies and admire bees? We punish one for ridding the world of feces and rotten meat, and adore the other for cavorting amid the flowers and filling our cups with honey). (Actually this is quite reasonable). (The bees furthermore, are better dressed).

Once i have had my morning coffee, the meditations on death dissolve, like mist in the rising sun. Dreams flee, existential ennui and its attendant abyss constrict to a neat quiet scar line. In the glorious light of the frontal lobe, well fueled by the metabolic storm of caffeine, purpose begins. We trade out the dark shadows of existence, dreamscapes and Dostoevsky for the neat, clipped descriptions of the New England Journal. The disciples of physiology (like those who study spheres, and the mappers of mind) don the heavy cloak of coffee cups and linear regression models and the work of the world continues.