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February 5, 2004
The Coat [Redux]
People! Rejoice with me. My outerwear problems are solved at last.
I'd like to thank the Academy, and my parents, and my husband, who made it all possible.
The quilt of clouds
Note for future re-reading reference: maybe February is not the best month to take a fancy to Sylvia Plath.
I've been reading The Bell Jar this week. I do love Saint Sylvia, but man, she is one bleak dame. I'm right at the part in this (mostly autobiographical) novel where the narrator's downward spiral begins — feelings of lostness, suicide attempts. Perhaps February isn't the best month to subject myself to this particular literary adventure.
Historically, February is among the most difficult months of the year for me, and probably many of those around me. I walk around feeling like I'm stuck in a cloud, literally and figuratively. All my thoughts struggle to rise up and take flight, but they just drift aimlessly until they catch in that low, gray sky, that quilt of gray clouds that unrolls over Atlanta on January 1 and doesn't seem to lift until mid-March.
The clouds, I've noticed, are the exact color of the web color #CCCCCC:
This is why I don't think I could ever live in a city like Chicago or New York, wonderful as those cities are. Those winters would just shred me to bits.
If you guys have any solutions for how to respond to twelve straight days of #CCCCCCC gray skies, let me know. Unless your suggestion involves sitting around at home reading Sylvia Plath while eating eight servings of Pepperoni Pizza Combos® for dinner ("The Official Cheese-Filled Snack of NASCAR," I kid you not). I've tried that, and let me tell you, it's not helping.
Of course, it is precisely this time of year that my desperate thoughts turn to spring in Atlanta. It's precisely this time of year that I am overwhelmed with relief and gratitude that Tom and I had the good sense to plant no less than 75 tulips in the front yard last October. They are still asleep now, but in just a few weeks they will wake up, and I will welcome the sight of their bright faces, none of which will be #CCCCCC gray.
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...Here's the bad news... scientific rationalism stripped the sacred canopy off the West. Where are the forbidden sacred groves? Where are the magic-makers? The holy and profane? Rationalism flattened everything. Nothing is sacred, nothing profane. We live in a landscape without moral shadows. — Tim, my beloved older brother, writing here, on his very own journal, which he just started a couple of weeks ago...
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Jimmie Dale Gilmore — One Endless Night
I don't know if you are familiar with the very unusual, nasal, quivery yet somehow pleasing voice of Jimmie Dale Gilmore. He covers "Mack the Knife" on this record. It's a very lazy, folksy version, and it is so unexpected and wonderful that it makes me laugh out loud almost every time I hear it.
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No one, not even Godzilla, needs to expectorate into the sink 45 times after brushing.
— February 5, 2003
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