It’s Been Like This All Day

Unless I’m hallucinating, an enormous white moon is rising over the hills right now, although it’s barely six and daylight is still hanging on in gray and pink shreds. The hills are an emphatic green, the green of a California winter once it’s rained, and I can see the black shapes of the grazing cattle. Everything is oddly still, almost expectant.

Just a little while ago, I heard the daily coyote serenade. For some reason they have been gathering quite near to the house in the early evenings and their yelps and howls have been louder, higher-pitched, and more sustained than usual. It’s very eerie and hard to ignore. One voice in particular rises above the others like a scream.

Now our own sweet dog is doing her frisky romp, one of those sudden outbursts of inexplicable exuberance, and I indulge her for a moment, then lean into the embrace of the sofa with a sigh.

"What can I do?" wrote the poet David Jauss. "It's been like this all day. Even the alarm clock had its hands all over me."

Mine too...that lithe little travel alarm I picked up in Rome, mischievous and insistent, awakening me chirpily at seven a.m. What can I do?

"Then I went out to the kitchen to make coffee -- yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved." (Sorry. I was channeling Raymond Chandler there, one of my current obsessions.) But the coffee WAS rich and ruthless, possibly even depraved, and the morning air held rumors of rain and light kisses, and I was doomed from the start to stumble along in a state of astonishment and distraction.

Additional documentation: by 11 a.m. I was driving along Nojoqui Road, under oak trees draped with Spanish moss, past the Alisal Ranch, where Hollywood stars like Clark Gable once cavorted, and I was listening on the radio to -- well, it was Led Zeppelin, if you must know. I was tuned to 99.9, partly because it is one of very few stations that come in clear there, but if I were to be honest, I would have to admit that when I’m by myself, I sometimes enjoy that kind of cheesy adolescent rock and roll. (Okay? It's the Long Island in me.) Anyway, it isn’t generally known, but certain Santa Barbara radio stations have a thing for the 1970s in general and Led Zeppelin in particular, a group that gets played far more than statistical chance would allow, and sometimes you just have to go with it. But the point is -- not only was this an absurd soundtrack –- but I was digging it. Yes, I was having a regressive, windows-open, low-brow, rockin' out, Led Zeppelin moment. And what's more, I was on my way to meet Vickie and Cornelia at the Blue Nile Café for an Ethiopian lunch.

Crazy, huh? Sometimes when I stop flagellating myself it just feels like good karma.

I love the convergences of incongruities, the wild unlikelihoods, the slapdash splash of random elements audaciously tossed together and served up as life. No wonder I can't sleep. There's too much going on.

On the news a little earlier I’d heard that Castro had resigned and Musharraff was headed for defeat and Hillary and Obama were running a close race in Wisconsin and the Pentagon had found an excuse to shoot a satellite out of the sky and there will be a lunar eclipse tomorrow. I learned, too, that bananas are an endangered fruit, and suicide among middle-aged people is on the rise. Oh, there was plenty more and always is, and some of it is scary, but today I muted the scary stuff and listened instead to coyotes and Led Zeppelin.

Today I let the day have its way with me, and I feel a little tawdry, but I like it.