Untitled Document

31 May 2005

Double Monday

It could be a lot worse, though it is a double Monday, and I have a full-scope polygraph scheduled this week. It is a double Monday because all the things that should have happened yesterday will happen today, along with everything that was going to happen anyway.

I don't know if it is the dread of that that made the come in the night. After all, there is a lot to be excited about. My small investments seem to be doing well, and if there is a bubble coming, it has not burst yet.

It is not like being Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once one of the richest men in the world oil and gas business, who was sentenced as I dreamed to nine long years in whatever Russia is calling the Gulag these days.

It could bring one to the verge of despair over democracy in the former Soviet Union , if that is what one was worrying about. But the way that Mikhail came to own the oil conglomerate might have been just as criminal as the way it was taken away again. Maybe Mr. Putin is a dangerous autocrat and maybe it is just Russia , a place where you should always watch your back and not presume too much.

But there is a lot of that going around, and not just in the former USSR .

When the day was done, I found myself re-writing the events that brought me to Big Pink in the dark. I figure that if I could get to the point where it was gentle, within the context of the unpleasantness, and perhaps even darkly humorous, then things would finally be settled. It started as a howl of rage, but with enough revision, I hoped it would be a useful and cautionary introduction to an entire world of change and transition, and would help color the account of the people who live within the great mauve flanks of the building.

It had elements of the theater of the absurd, and an awful sort of immediacy. But all the stories here have that.

I arrived at Big Pink on the first of October of the year of the crashing airplanes, broke and defiant, astonished by how the process worked. How could one anticipate the banal and relentless intrusion of the State into your life, into the most private crannies?

But there has not been enough passage of time to put a sepia tone to it, and there are parts I don't like to think about. I am proud that despite the four or five jobs I have had to cram into the last three years, I have met my obligations in a timely and thorough manner. Two years to go and I will be done with the last of the college bills, and I have already purchased the second graduation watch, and the graduation car, should that come to pass.

This phase of life began on a Sunday in Fairfax County , and wound up as a Sunday in Arlington , three and a half years ago. I dislike Sundays, since I do not like to work. It is not so bad when one is actually in the working week, and I take a certain pleasure from a job well done. But two days off is almost enough to require retraining.

A three-day weekend almost is enough to make me forget what it was I was supposed to be doing, and not at all eager to discover what it was.

I was yakking on the phone, the land-line, last night when the cell went off. It is modern life, I suppose, to have the television on mute, captions running below the illuminated screen, the computer chirping out the arrival of new Spam and Instant Messages, while one phone is pressed to the right ear and the cell to the other.

Both callers knew one another, and thus I was left translating between the two, eight inches of cranial wetware connecting the two phones.

It was a rollicking call, for the most part, catching up and sharing plans for the Summer season to come. Talk of the pool, which lies just beyond my patio, and the life outside on the porches of the ground-floor units of the massive structure. We have emerged from our winter burrows, and it is time to plan for precisely the right tan, and the parties on the patios in the late afternoon.

The rhythm has begun this long weekend with the pool open at last. Lori from the sixth floor was down just before prime ray-time. She is well on her way to the Hamilton Award for deepest tan. She is Italian, and her winter pallor would pass for a week in Florida for the dead-white northern Europeans. I think she can retire the prize this year.

One of the usual suspects remarked that she lived with an African man who rarely came to the pool. There was an arched eye-brow, and I stifled the impulse to tell him to stuff himself.

If she is happy, what she does is her right and no one's business but her own. But of course at Big Pink we live close, and private business is sometimes uncomfortably public. It takes a thick skin.

Leslie-the-grandmother from the fifth floor was down, not to swim, but to talk, and Margaret was making plans for Joe's inaugural party of the season. I asked if I could bring something, and she said she didn't know. “My only job is to ask people,” she laughed. She said the jewel that glittered from her belly-ring was a fake. I had wondered, since she manages a Cartier store at the upscale mall, and it could have been quite real.

Old Jack invited himself to the party that was in progress at Tony's place across the walk from mine. He has a hot-tub and a banner mounted to a tree that says “Living the Porch Life.” Jigs was there, bigger than life, and the pretty girl with the dirty-blonde hair from West Virginia .

They were burning something at the communal grill beyond the back fence of the pool area, and eventually the sun passed away beyond the trees and it was time to think about work again, and getting organized to do it.

By the time the clouds rolled in, big time, Tony's party had moved inside and I was on the phone.

On the right side of my head I was talking to a close pal in another state. On the left side I was talking to a very old pal in yet another state. We talked about plans for the season and travel, and summer things. I loved being in the middle, both parties hearing what I was saying and yet not able to hear one another.

We have a general plan now, and I glanced at the clock. Time for night to sweep over me. I watched part of the NBA West finals before I went to bed. The Spurs were surging, and it was vaguely interesting, like listening to a family squabble from the open windows on the second floor.

When I slept, the first dream was about a pig and an abattoir, and the second was the vampire dream that featured members of both Bush Administrations in prominent roles.

When the BBC came on to tell me about the fate of the Russian Oil Tycoon and the failure of Europe to unite, I felt curiously un-rested. It was Tuesday, I thought.

A double Monday.