September 9: "The Long Day," Recuperating, Workaholic Habits

It has been a long day.  But Mondays usually are.

I did library stuff, taught film at the university, did more library stuff, and went over my Bigfoot manuscript one last time, looking typos and misplaced commas and clunky passages.  I just finished that process.  It's a little past 10 p.m. now, and my body is now officially telling me it has been a long day.

Billy Collins writes about his long day . . . 

The Long Day

by: Billy Collins

In the morning I ate a banana
like a young ape
and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”

In the afternoon I opened the mail
with a short kitchen knife,
and when dusk began to fall

I took off my clothes,
put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”
and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.

I closed my eyes and thought
about the alphabet,
the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten

to become literature.
If the British call z zed,
I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead?

And why does z, which looks like
the fastest letter, come at the very end?
unless they are all moving east

when we are facing north in our chairs.
It was then that I heard
a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark.

and the claw-footed bathtub
took one step forward,
or was it backward

I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a faraway towel.

I am still recuperating from the virus I caught last week.  My nose continues running, and, every once in a while, I experience a coughing fit that would have landed me in a tuberculosis sanatorium a hundred years ago.  I'm staring at my laptop screen right now through a veil of teary water, another lovely symptom.

Tomorrow promises to be even longer.  I have a library program in the evening, so I won't be getting home much before 9 p.m., just in time for the big showdown between Kamala Harris and the felon.  I really love the work I do, but my workaholic habits are catching up with me.  In the next few days, I have a feeling I'm going to crash, take to my bed, and sleep for about 12 or 13 hours.  I've been through this cycle more than once.

So, forgive Saint Marty if he doesn't wax philosophic tonight.  His store of wisdom is a little dry, and his head is full of mucous.