July 4

Independence Day, a little haze blown from the Kantishna fire to the west, but otherwise another in a series of beautiful days stacked one atop the other, the sky absent of cloud, blue behind the faint gossamer smoke, the snow on the peaks sharp & sun-soaked. Awakening today feeling disoriented, jarred a bit just as I had prior to California. Maybe endemic to the cabin, maybe local to my slow cruxing. Walked for four hours to post office & back yesterday before working to eleven, & maybe just thrown from that, but there is an odd familiarity in this heaviness, a kind of consanguinity with the worst of it over these last months. The in-fighting, selves in violent combat somewhere in me where words cannot reach. Amazing what remains obscure in you, what refuses clarity, what wages on obstinate against every inquiry into disposition. & I have grown so accustomed to this leaden weight in my chest, this awful sadness enwreathing my heart, that it seems a miracle simply to breath. The physical sensation of it unrelenting, poised just on the cusp of some brimming over, meniscus of the manageable. & a little panic here & there a self-yeast, catalyst to its eruption. & then I breath more, & settle, & it lodges back where it started. But this is progress, I suppose.

& in the meantime wondering if I might be driven to wit’s end by Roy, whose idiosyncrasies are impossible to describe, & whose slovenliness would almost be impressive in its rounded commitment if I didn’t have to cohabitate with it. At home, it is as if he perches at the table doing nothing, admiring the kitchen he’s ransacked & dirtied, waiting until I appear so he can repeat his stories over & again, slowly & in excruciating detail. & so it is at home. & at work, between calls he continues the same stories over & again, & then fumbles at every radio contact, every telephone call. & never a shower. I have seen him use the restroom only four times since I arrived. This is a mystery to me. How he is in the world is a mystery to me. Every day I lose more patience, find myself less tolerant, sharper-tongued, quicker to escape. By the summer’s end I may be living outside in a pitched tent just to avoid further contact.

Well. What a life. Now off to bake halibut before heading from home (with Roy) to work (with Roy). & swiftly & such & so on go the days.

Comments

jp said…
Now, I could be way off base here, and sometimes I'm not the best judge of character or species, but are you certain that Roy is not a Yeti?
July 5, 2009 at 10:41 AM
ap said…
if only he were as elusive, as secretive, as vague-of-form as the yeti. alas, there is nothing questionable about his existence, even if there is much to question about it.
July 5, 2009 at 3:42 PM
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