Karmic Homeostasis

As a writer, you develop a certain fetish about your tools & surroundings. Keyboard? Precisely here. Black Pilot Precise V5 felt-tip pens? Precisely here. Oh, and there must be three of them, and a stack of three yellow legal pads behind them, and you need to be looking at a broadsheet of Mexican loteria images taped to the wall so your mind can play with La Sirena, El Corazon, and El Borracho when Imagination wanders off to los baños to powder her nose.

That’s one of the reasons why I’ve been finding it so difficult to write since I moved across the river, I suppose. The setup just feels wrong.

The other reason?

Nothing’s worth writing about. My life is singularly bereft of narrative. No one is behaving badly. No one is behaving well. No one is behaving at all. There’s no one to behave since I barely know anyone on this side of the river.

This new world is singularly smooth and without indentation. Each day wants to be precisely like the one that came before it and the one that will come after it. I can’t even go adventuring to any of the cool little towns( Catskill, Saugerties) on this side of the river because it’s so damn hot.

I’m not complaining.

Merely observing.

###

Meanwhile, a client sent me a modestly-sized assignment so the kiskas won’t starve.

And I had a long conversation yesterday with a pal whose mother contracted West Nile fever a couple of years back and is now in the most horrible shape imaginable with grotesque muscle contractions in addition to the more common neurological sequelae of memory loss and deep depression.

Pandora (not her real name), A’s mother, was an exceedingly beautiful, charming, accomplished woman—not that I’m implying that great beauty should yield immunity against mosquito-borne diseases, you understand.

But Pandora did seem to be living a charmed life (albeit one that included a scoundrel husband), British, rich, if not quite an aristocrat herself, then upper crust-y enough to pass as one among unenlightened Yanks.

It seems to me nearly all the people I would describe as living charmed lives have one awful thing that happens to them—a plane crash, a fire, the murder of a child—that’s so inexpressibly horrible that it acts as a kind of karmic ballast to all the rest of their privileged life so that in the end, the balance of life turns out to be a kind of karmic homeostasis, tipped neither toward "fortunate" nor "unfortunate."

The rest of us had to endure alcoholic fathers, crazy mothers, broken hearts, scrambling to pay the rent, social and professional failures of various sorts, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Pandora had to endure none of those things.

But she got West Nile Fever.