Work To Do.

Last week, I grew enraged with a writer because he was rude about another writer. (Didactic, I thought, and borderline unkind.) I crossly unsubscribed. And then I forgave him utterly because he stuck up for a poet I love. So I subscribed again.

I think this place - and I do, sometimes, write about this place because it is still so new to me and because it is entirely not like other social media platforms - can bring out the teenager in me. I discover writers I’ve never heard of and have tremendous pashes on them, just as I had on David Bowie or Lou Reed or Jean Knight singing Mr Big Stuff, and then I get a shock because they say something boring or self-indulgent or mean and I think: but you weren’t supposed to do that.

And then it happens the other way round. I saw a man whose name I did know be all curmudgeonly and I thought: he hasn’t aged well. (A rather horrid, quick judgement, now I pause to remember.) Days later he wrote a heart-wrenching piece about being down in the yawning pit of depression. I was radically wrong: he hadn’t turned into a curmudgeon at all. He was writing from despair.

I had a lovely birthday weekend but I was a little teenage-ish about that too - slightly over-excited and almost too full of fun, so that now my sleep patterns are disturbed and I keep throwing off all my bedding in the night and swearing out loud at the duvet. (‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’) My extreme introversion means I always have to pay a price for too much fun. The mares are literally caked in mud and even though the snowdrops are out, I am fruitlessly counting the days until the spring. (Fruitlessly, because it won’t come any quicker.)

Perhaps this faint anomie is because of the bombardment of mad news. I try to avoid the news because it messes with my head. I’m too old for this nonsense and I can’t do anything about the madness. But this news cycle is so big and so relentless and so nuts that it keeps seeping in round the edges. No wonder I am hurling all the bedclothes off in my sleep.

But I will one day sleep quietly again and spring will come and perhaps even the news might get less mad. In the meantime, there is this, from Mary Oliver:

I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.