Exercise thy hands
I was going to do a lot today...at least that's what I told myself when I finally went outside to walk Danny at noon. It was a nice day out and I didn't have to be in to work until 5 today. Alas, after eating a healthier meal than I've had in a long time, I got caught up in the internet for too long while letting my food settle. When I finally went outside at 3:30 to put air in my tires and fill my water bottle up I found myself staring at a palm tree with all its fronds waving and bent in one direction and a sky luminous with dark gray clouds. I guess it has finally become summertime and if I really want to keep a regular exercise regime up on the bike, then I need to wake earlier and get it out of the way before lunchtime.
This is how my days are lately. I wake up sometime around 10:30 or 11:30 in the morning, turn on my computer and read the news for the day, finally emerge into sunlight around noon or soon thereafter and lethargically get through the next three hours before I have to start getting ready for work. I normally would look at this pattern in life as the result of depression but I'm not quite sure that is the case here. Living in the keys has its drawbacks. The few friends I have here generally work during the day when I have freetime and I work in the evenings when they have free. Therefore I am generally left to entertain myself during the day in a place with little to entertain me.
Books, beach, bars. I've been reading a lot more lately than I have since college and I just finished a book earlier today, one week after finishing the 1200 page book I completed last week after having it consume my life for nearly a month. Sometimes I go to the beach to read, or lay out, or I'll go to the pool to swim and read and lay out or I'll go somewhere for a bite to eat. That's how I pass the days before work.
Can I really handle living like this for one more year? I ask myself this question at least once a week and I can never answer it. Instead, I create lists in my mind...things I could do, things I want to do, to improve my time here in the keys, to live a healthier life, to prepare myself for life after the thru-hike. I want to write more, hence this sudden revival of Consummated Randomness. I want to delve back into the world of poetry, reading familiar poems and new poems, escaping in the pages of Justice, Olds, and Bishop. I want to write constantly. Revisit old poems, edit, chop, refine, re-birth forgotten lines, polish the gems and bury the shit. Re-write, re-write, and discard. I want to live my life again as if I was back in college, running home from class with my mind racing of new thoughts, a contrived conversation shared at Krishna lunch, animated classmates arguing the importance of a nearly forgettable line in a novel. I want to be able to create here in the keys an environment ripe with creativity, a mood which I can place myself in and let thoughts flow from hand to keyboard or from hand to paper, the more romantic means.
posted by RPF @ 12:43 PM
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