No matter what time I go to bed I can't sleep in past 7:30. If I stayed up all night and went to bed at 7:29, I'd still wake up at 7:30. It's a sickness. Why isn't there a hip name for people prone to early rising? There is no cool corollary to the term night owl. A night owl would totally murder and eat an early bird; there is no doubt about it. Initially the gym seemed like a good option, to start the day off with exercise and sweat, but I think I ate too much bran cereal and dark chocolate before bed. Doing so produces a kind of chocolate shrapnel in your stomach which coils through your intestines like bloated barbed wire. I've already turned my toilet bowl into a chocolatey, fudge-filled sundae. Perhaps I'll clean my bathroom instead of going to the gym.
After that, or maybe before, I'll finally finish editing the photos from my trip to Utah. Editing is a way to travel through time. Not because you're going back to the past while you view the photos, but because you forego the present and land smack into the future hours later. When you start, no matter what time it is, you will finish hours later, having accomplished little but anesthetize time's passing. Entire weekends have been burned editing photos. There is something obsessive about it, and meditative, a beautiful single-mindedness of purpose numbs the desire to do anything else but achieve an aesthetic. It too is a sickness.
In many ways all things are a sickness. What isn't? Health? Life? Love? Happiness? Nope. We treat these things with such seriousness and severity that they often make us ill. We pursue them relentlessly, often chasing health at the cost of happiness, happiness at the cost of life. Life is a terminal condition that must be treated; through medicine, aging, denial, and increasing limitations on any and all forms of mobility. We are on a one way track to stillness, always. This went unexpectedly dark and gloomy, sorry. It's cloudy outside; blame the fog. My sinuses are also acting up, producing a low-level headache and bad taste in the back of my mouth. All that dust from canyoneering last week laid waste to the delicate lining in my nose.
Imagine what breathing in dirt and dust must be like for the mucus membrane of the nasal passage. When I was a kid I'd work construction with my father here and there, to make a buck and learn the value of hard manual labor; mostly by watching Manuel labor. One hot summer day I was tasked with installing insulation in the roof of some basement of an old house in Manhattan. I'd never touched insulation before, but it looked like a batch of botched pink cotton candy sandwiched between two sheets of brown paper. My dad said to be careful, that it was made of fiber glass, not to let it touch my skin. The thing about installing insulation, especially in a ceiling over your head, is that it's going to get all over your fucking skin. This is likely why my shrewd old man avoided the responsibility and delegated the task to me. As you stick it up in the ceiling, little fibers and fuzz fall from the insulation and rain down on you, melting right into your wet, sweat-covered skin. It itches terribly, and scratching does nothing to alleviate the sensation. It is awful. That's how I imagine my nose felt when it sucked up dust, dirt, and fine particles of rock from the red orange desert.
Yesterday I volunteered at a homeless shelter for the better part of the morning. I helped cook, clean, serve, and make decorations. I spoke to people who are routinely made to feel invisible and unwanted, instead granting them time, kindness, and attention. One older gentleman, all grizzled and grey, seated in a wheelchair, with a crippled leg and mouthful of missing teeth, smiled warmly and told me his name was Paris, like the city. He mumbled and spoke in a way that was unused to the common conventions of conversation, as homeless people often do. But he was polite and gracious and it was obvious to anyone that the human contact he was given was a greater gift than the food. The dynamic is different when working with the homeless in a shelter than when passing them on the street. In a shelter they acknowledge you want to be there, that you are there to help; you aren't simply a strange fish with a wallet dangling from your pocket that they might be able to hook with a clever lure.
Well, for some of them, anyway. There were people who said there were too many red peppers in the meal we made; that if we didn't have grape soda they didn't want any soda at all; that they only wanted fruit, no pasta; that they only wanted pasta, no fruit; that they just wanted three sodas instead of food. Some people were charming and seemed to have fallen on bad fortunes while others seemed to still be coming down from an all-night bender, having eaten the same drugs I did Monday night. Some people were polite and charming and others were terse and rude. Some people smiled and some people frowned. Oh, and the homeless people were nice, too.
People are people, whether or not they have a home.
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