Well we don't know the cabinets and corners of the mind said Uncle Jacob. We don't know which directions they extend in and which are untouchable. That is quite marvelous replied Gregory.
I am bereft for a cup of tea. Let us sit down and discuss the varying faculties to which we are each day held in marvelous intensity. Can you say that this door opens this way into the light
or that one into the darkness? We are plunged into sheer darkness merely on account of our not knowing the darkness from the light. Distractions will me to find a new recourse of imagined
troubles and then to work on a problem. I am told that we humans are problem seekers, and each problem is a minor or major sphinx depending on its difficulty. And each problem has the
capacity to swallow us up completely, even the smallest among them. If not attended to, failing to maintain the oil levels in a bike, or in a human body may lead to its demise. This can
happen to generals and to those just starting out on the course of their life. I know for instance that most of my problems stem from money. The failure to have any kind of substantial
life savings has left me in the dark. Last night I dreamt that my mother was dying as she spoke on the phone. That is another potential problem. If I don't head out now into the sunset
the chances are I never will. She is unlocking the door presently and the day will soon begin. In 7 sacred minutes from now all will start anew. The revving of mowers and the like. I think"
we are doing our Thursday regulars today. That means I can stay here a bit longer with my writing. It's the hardest thing in the world to face one's own thinking; one's own mind. What a
maze of possibilities! What a complex jungle of doubts and anxieties! I say this with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach: No one is exempt. And it extends all around my torse, this
feeling of stuffed hollowness. A black hole that swallows my days located in my stomach. A voice that says:"Well then! It's time to get moving now, isn't it?" It must be now or never!
Perhaps there is no going back now, but perhaps there is. My mind greets the razor's edge of possibilities. But surely, I think to myself, surely the truth, if it is indeed the truth
we are observing, can be accessed from anywhere? Surely I can find my feet wherever I am? Even in this bed of mine. Surely there is nothing to fear if you are with the truth, and surely
you will like a cat always find your way to the floor safely? The doubt of this fact chews me up at times. I try to find a solution to life's problems by doubting the course I'm on.
I try to find a physical way out of a spiritual problem, and then I end up comparing myself with others. I am happy with what I have and who I am I should rather say to myself. I
spent last night doing naughty things. Getting caught up in mischief and also some very deep enterprises. The conclusion occurred to me that I need only to read the basic works of depth,
Unlocking the Bible and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Surely then I can scale this mountain? What mountain it is is also to be discovered. It would be a mistake to start with the
specifics and get lost on some periphery of meaning. I am not sure of very much else. That's all I seem to have available to me. One gnawing concern is my lack of ordiness though, and
for order I think I need to have a full time job. It's either that or become self-motivated enough to do a job in an orderly way. Order for me is boring in some way and so I usually
resort to chaos. But chaos can only take a man so far. If I were orderly, Jordan Peterson would say, there's no telling how far it could take me. Yesterday I did get excited about something
rather surprising though. And maybe this is a key. It was the confetti bushes we found in another client's garden. And I began to think how we could also help people who were on a small
budget by transplanting trees from one garden to another. Another thing which made me very content was the work we did yesterday. Instead of cutting the tops of the restios, I suggested
we cut the restios around the peripheries instead of across the tops. And we did a whole lot of work there; but by the end of it, I felt content just looking at everything and thinking
how wealthy and professional it all was. Sometimes I think that some or other detail about life isn't worth writing about. For instance, my thumbs are locking up as I type. I didn't think
that was worth mentioning. It seems trivial but really it's important to me as I write. I think about age and aging as I do this. And only just now, while I was writing this my mother
called me downstairs. Actually it was David. I feigned absence on the first knock on the door downstairs. Actually, he didn't knock, he called. And on the second call I finally groaned:
Yes?? (Mr Dylan he called me). He said my mother wanted me to take out the car. And so I did. I saw her chatting to the gardener across the road. Then I ran up to complete this screed.
It must be done I thought. I had also thought while in the car that the girl yesterday was another detail of the day and that I should write that too. She is well spoken and she tends
to harp on details. In that case it was the lack of pens. And well I spoke of the pens too, and that clients always take pens. And then she found one under the leaves of a clip board.
And well, that was that I thought. But she kept talking about the pen turning up. She gestured again as if she were feeling something under the leaves of the clipboard and then recounted
a eureka moment. Well that seemed amazing to her. But I begin to suspect at this point that all our conversations up until this point were just fabricated; that she creates drama around
small things. And her style of dress is another thing that makes me consider looking down on her. It's colourless and plastic. She had on grey plasticky boots and pants which were a light
dead brown or some other colour with a cheap maroon cardigan. And is this the town I live in? It's all a little odd. But then again I was in Thailand too, and that was mostly odd anyway.
I hear the clattering of a door downstairs and I realize that my mom might have entered the garage and might be calling me soon. I feel the anxiety rising. It feels as if I'm committing
a crime here, writing as I am when I should be downstairs, committed to my work. It feels as if the day will start with a bang or a whimper and neither is particularly enthralling. It
seems as if I should be somewhere else altoghether, doing some kind of writing work in an office in some university town, or maybe just a bohemian home. If I do anything today, it seems
it will leave me with a bitter aftertaste which will merely grow the hole I feel in my stomach. I will think about a great many things, but only a few of them will leave me satisfied;
and the trouble is I don't know which ones and in which sequence. One rising source of anxiety is the mother's day breakfast I have to attend this Saturday or Sunday. I do not like
that Tana woman too much. She's always pleading poverty of energy or poverty of relatives or some or other kind of poverty racking her damnable soul. I suspected her yesterday of some
sly kind of selfishness dressed up as philanthropy. She told me "Make a cup of tea for your mother." Well, I thought rebelliously, I think that she really just wants a cup of tea for
herself and that she's dressing up her concern for herself in a concern for my mother. There are plenty of these little misuses of kindness in the world, and now we have one more, I thought.
Which leads me to thinking, I really prefer to write for myself for now. I don't like the performance aspect of writing. It seems contrived and manipulative, and I don't want to do that.
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