mallorys_camera | Proximal Causes

Dreamed I was in magic school, taking an exam.

The first question on the exam was absolutely incomprehensible: You were supposed to figure out the nature of a quality floating around a girl from the absence of other qualities floating around her sister. A very strange mathematical equation with odd coefficients floating in space, & I could not solve it!

Go on to the next question, I told myself. Forget the math! Do the language problems! You'll get all the language problems right!

But I would not let that first question go! I kept trying & trying to solve it!

Two girls who were also taking the test began talking & laughing in loud voices.

Stop talking! I yelled at them. You're breaking my concentration!

One of the girls began to cry. She was kind of an amalgamation of the two girls who represent careless youth at its prettiest to me right now, A________ & H_____ (though A________ must be close to 40 these days, come to think of it.)

I finished the exam an hour early, sniffed the crying girl. And it's unfair to just make me sit here doing nothing—

Fine, I said. Don't.

And slammed my exam book shut. Hurled it at the proctor.

I'm not doing this shit anymore, I announced.

And began to stalk off.

Knowing full well the proctor would come after me!

Because everyone thought I was so immensely talented.

###

In other news, did 1,500 words of Remuneration and 2,000 words on the Work in Progress (when it flows, it flows), and somehow managed to fuck up my left knee. Who knows how? I did tromp—in between rain storms—and tromping was effortless. But my left knee and my left soleus are sore today—

This is the worst thing about being old. Things hurt without proximal cause!

###

Also, Ichabod texted me just after I went to bed. Venting! he said. We'd talked on the phone earlier in the day as he was driving up to San Francisco on the way to judge some local law schools' Battle of the Mock Court.

So, I locked my keys in my car!

Triple A had had to open his car for him.

I was seized with anxiety: When you're in the type of mood where you lock your keys in your car, you're also in the mood when you get into an automobile accident, and I kept picturing Ichabod lying in a ditch somewhere near Morgan Hill.

Maternity!

Not for the faint of heart.