it’s pretty ecstatic out. cool. good sky. it doesn’t happen all the sudden, but seems to. flowers everywhere. lots and lots of birds. I even heard a woodpecker or distant powertool.

I used to think birds were boring. I assume that most birds are sparrows unless they obviously aren’t. I certainly don’t think birds are boring anymore. this is perhaps due in part to having one as a pet, but it is also due to getting older.

nothing gives us perspective. people say they have perspective when they feel calm, bright and organized in their head. but when you have perspective, you don’t really have any more perspective than when you don’t. I think. I might be all wrong due to lack of perspective. but I feel healthy. I still have some of the cool on my face from outside, where I just was. my lungs feel good — wonder.

I worked hard, had some luck but mostly was very alert and have set things up pretty well in life. I have lots of spare time. much of my adult life has been spent dealing with anxiety around dealing with spare time & what to do with it. granted, as a problem, it’s preferable to dealing with the lack thereof, but still it is a problem, as all problems are.

in high school I didn’t have spare time. many days I would come home from school, start doing homework, and not stop until I went to sleep, and still would not get it all done. partly due to excessive workload in my classes, but mostly due to what seemed like — and perhaps were — extraordinary difficulties with reading, concentration.

so in college I was so fascinated by the manageableness of my courseload and also by the flexibility. being able to choose my own classes. amazing. and at my college, we only had four classes per semester. and with some AP credit, in my senior year I had three classes per semester. as for the manageableness, I just mean that it was possible to do all the work and still have time left over to do other things. early in my first semester of college, I remember taking a piece of graph paper and making a grid of my waking hours, and coloring in the boxes when I had classes and my workstudy job. nobody prompted me to do this. it was just a natural thing to do, and I experienced it as an indulgence, proving to myself what I otherwise had difficulty believing, that there were as many gaps during the week as I thought when I went over my schedule in my head. and I would look at the graph paper with the huge blocks of free time, and it was thrilling.

I don’t think I ever had much anxiety about spare time either in college or grad school. when I think about my life and how I’ve felt at different times, generally, I assume that the trend as I’ve aged has loosely been toward increasing (tho never acute) anxiety, and what. just a sense that the future is, for one thing, there, and for another, not necessarily hospitable. it may be hospitable, but there’s more of a sense that it might not be. I’m not sure what, if anything, I thought about “the future” in my early twenties. really I’m not sure what, if anything, I think about it now.

so that’s what I assume. I suppose it’s an assumption of sorts, that things have become more a matter of anxiety, or have increasingly required a greater degree of alertness or creativity to feel ok or good. and really if I just feel ok, I don’t feel ok, because it seems too close to not feeling ok. the word that often comes to mind is struggle. it’s a struggle to be a person. I don’t think it used to be a struggle in quite the same way.

tho, having said all this, I wouldn’t have said all this if I wasn’t also sort of planning to say that I’m not sure about any of it. maybe I don’t have more anxiety now. not sure. I have waves of being concerned about death, to the point of distraction at times. I had such a wave during my first semester of college. and I feel like I’ve been having one of those waves for, a couple years I think.

I do have this vague sense, that I think I’ve mentioned here at times, that much of my behavior or experience is guided by fear, during times when I have discretionary time. it’s something I barely know. I barely have this sense that some of my actions would otherwise be different, that it takes away some of my intelligence, what I think of as intelligence. it is interference. it is never acute, so it’s not fear like conscious fear of something specific. it’s something that seems like that’s the word for it.

following grad school, I think it took at least three years before I stopped having the feeling, and even the thought, at night, that I didn’t have any homework that night. I would sometimes have a real thought process almost like “what do I have to do tonight, oh, I’m not in school, there is no homework, that was years ago.”

for so much of early life we are subjected to a grotesque overdetermination of our schedules, from which we don’t easily recover. there is too much school and much of it is wasted time. it is a hell of a thing to do to a person in their formative years, tho I suppose now scientists are discovering that all our years are formative.

* * *

today I had this experience with my kitchen table, where all the sudden I became intelligent about the mass of associations and anxieties I have around my kitchen table. I’ve long known that there was some problem with me and the table. it didn’t seem like something that could be understood or addressed. some of it has to do with where I face and what I see when I sit there. some of it has to do with usually not facing anyone and wondering about the abnormality of that. some of it has to do with the crap that piles up there. mail, paperwork, egg carton with bolts from something I tried to fix but couldn’t, and a gift (shaggy doo chia planter) I was given that requires me to do something that I haven’t done, and some daily things that come and go like keys, wallet, ear buds, phone. the dailiness of those things sometimes bothers me. because sometimes they’re there and sometimes somewhere else.  but they’re always there when I’m there. I don’t know.

I’ve known about all this for some time. I rarely eat there. not dinner. sometimes lunch. today I was sitting there eating a bowl of donettes and taking pictures of the table and things on it, and I became comfortable with it. I dunno. I went in here and started writing a blog post but then I realized I don’t have to write a blog post every time something happens, and I wanted to make sure I went outside. in any case, I got a different feeling about my table and realized it is important, my relationship with the table, and not doomed.  and there’s a lot of cultural stuff one deals with when sitting at a table. I don’t have any kind of traditional familial associations. it’s not like my family ate together when I was growing up. we rarely ate dinner together. now when we get together, we often eat dinner, but often it’s not at a table. actually I think that may be a problem. tables are good. it’s different than eating on laps. recently there was some impromptu kitchen table eating at my mom’s house where there was no dinner plan but some of us plopped down there and ate greek salads that my mom had bought from a restaurant for her lunches, but we sat down there and started eating them, first me and her, then my sister and nephew arrived. my nephew had brought some pizza, tho. not sure how he had the foresight.

as I’ve more or less said, the world is my brain.  certainly my apartment is.  there are these blocks of intelligence in it, some of which are dull and static for a long time.  mostly things have to be dull and static for a long time before they become (if they do)  an activated, accessible part of intelligence.  much of it is lying around in the world, known and unnoticed.