He rose again. Isn’t it amazing, he finds, that every morning, no matter what, he never fails to wake up! On his way into his meditation space he realizes, though, that the dog has once again pooped and peed in the entryway, so he attends to that first. Then he can begin the ritual of the day, a ritual he just set up for the beginning of the new year. Wake up, rise, shower (or not), meditate for 30, bicycle for 40 or 45, have breakfast, do the rest of the day. Looking out the window, he notices that it’s been raining but seems to be coming down lightly enough at the moment, after meditation, for a slightly damp ride on the bike. No problem. Meditation goes well. He reads a short passage from Thich Nhat Hanh, rings the bell, and focuses on the breath for 30 minutes. He doesn’t look at the timer once but there is some shifting of the body here and there, and of the mind as well. As the closing bell rings and he gets up off the cushion, stands, and tries to work out the kinks with a little stretching, he notices that the rain now is really coming down. He is determined to ride. No need for rain gear, though, he says to himself, but he does change his shoes. As he takes off on his route, the rain comes down harder and he immediately doubts the wisdom of this morning’s exercise. Barely down the street, he turns the bike around to come home, thinks better of it, and turns the bike around again. He’s already sopping wet, but decides, rather than abort the morning’s ride, to simply shorten it. He takes a different route, a good ten minutes shorter than the usual one, but with a steep climb at the end, and when he gets home, miserable as he is, he is somewhat pleased with himself for completing a ride.
Don’t ask me why I chose to write that in third person. I think it was simply because I was amused by the first sentence that came into my head after writing the title “On the Third Day of 2024.” And while I’m annotating my own prose here for a second, let me also notice that I’ve written this paragraph entirely in the present tense–except for that first sentence, because, you know, that first sentence, in present tense, simply would not be amusing. “He rises again.” That’s no good. Not if you’re making jokes about the Nicene creed. I suppose I could have written, “He is risen.”
Later, I uploaded two new songs to our engineer’s website and scheduled a mastering session for Monday, January 8.
I made a sandwich.
I walked the dogs to make up for the short bicycle ride and the fact that our dogs have been neglected so far in the new year. They deserve some attention, despite the fact that one of them keeps pooping and peeing in the entryway–maybe because of it.
I took a nap.
My favorite passage so far in Ross Gay’s The Book of (More) Delight, is the one where he claims (against Descartes’s idea that the word “wonder” has no opposite) that the opposite of wonder is “know-it-all-ery.” “The know-it-all’s job,” he writes, “is to put a stake in wonder’s fat and gooey heart.” And what follows in one of the next short little essays is a piece about how, because of a bicycle flat tire, he walks instead to a coffee shop to write– and along the way comes into contact with a half a dozen friends and acquaintances, most of whom give him fruit. I think “wonder” is the right word. Gay’s essays exude with wonder. It is the most unabashedly cheerful book I think I have ever read.
And that particular essay about walking instead of riding makes me think about how often I think about the fact that I don’t know my neighbors. None of my neighbors have ever given me fruit. Once, one neighbor gave us squash–and it was when we were walking. I live in a neighborhood in which most people stay indoors. One of these days I’m going to walk up to each of their houses, knock on the door, and introduce myself. I’m going to write down their names. I’m going to try to learn something about them. I’m going to ask them if they have any fruit. Even though I have never really lived in a neighborhood where that seemed possible, it is a kind of longing within me–to know my neighbors, to be friendly with my neighbors, even, to become real friends with some of them.
In the meanwhile, it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and I am meeting on Zoom with a group of writer friends who all graduated from the same MFA program for writers. We will chat for awhile and then over the course of two hours we’ll do the thing we’ve been doing together for the last several months every Wednesday–we will write. If we all lived in the same neighborhood I bet we’d be doing this in person. Zoom has become the new front porch or the new living room where physical space is no longer a thing. We’ll sit in a circle, talk shop, write together, and give each other fruit from our backyards.
michael jarmer 