Oracle or Polymath

 I have up days, and I have down days.  The balance has shifted over the past year or so.  Yesterday was a down day.  All I could manage to do was water the shrubs and palms.  I must listen to my travel/art buddy who has become an oracle.  In defiance of the Weather Channel which keeps predicting week upon week of rain that never comes, he says it will never rain here again.  Every hour, the Weather Channel changes its forecast pushing the wet weather further and further down the road.  My buddy is, I presume, practicing the auguries.  

Other than performing such black arts, however, he is relatively normal.  As are all my friends, it seems.  Or, minimally, they are becoming more so.  It is almost Biblical, really.  1 Corinthians 13:11.  It makes more sense to them than it does to me.  I still love childish things. 

Tiresias transformed into a woman, 17th century.

I can't seem to stop myself.  Absurdities abound, especially in juxtaposition.  I never tire of remarking upon these, and I end up texting them.  I need to stop it.  I'll start sending photographs of my mother instead.  But only occasionally.  

So yesterday, I stayed upon the couch.  Day to night.  I was full of a deep despair and an anxiety that were uncharacteristic but which are becoming more frequent.  I wrote to Q that an Existentialist is a Nihilist who is living.  I've often been accused of being a Nihilist by colleagues because I question their "truths."  

"Where are these eternal verities?" I ask.  "How did you come upon them?"

Now I have no colleagues, and so I become more irritating to my remaining friends.  If I can't attack some accepted truth, I can still ridicule norms.  

Or I can stay upon the couch for endless hours.  

Late last night, I eschewed meditation.  I settled on "The French Connection" instead.  It didn't lift my spirits at all.  I was awash in the grittiness of the '70s.  I might as well have watched a movie by Cassavetes.  I grew up in cynical times.  Watching any movies from the '70s is like going to another land.  

It is why we had the '80s and Ronald Reagan.  And Reagan is why we had Clinton and the '90s.  Take a look and you will see how each decade is a reaction to the last.  Bush.  Obama.  Trump.  These are eight year decades, I guess.  

I must pull myself together today.  I am responsible for the Memorial Day repast.  It is nothing, but it is stressing me out.  My mother is coming.  Maybe one other.  There will be food.  There will be drink.  But it is incumbent on me not to be depressed.  I need be cheery and happy.  It is a long way from the basement to the upper floors.  

There are days I look around and don't understand how people do it.  How do they continue?  How do they go on?  

I guess they've learned a secret that I have never learned.  

I always wanted to be a polymath.  I should have left that to the geniuses.