Jumping In With Both Feet Tied Behind My Back...

Actually, I don't know where the hell that title is coming from...it's one of those "just let the subconscious rip" kind of days.  The sort of thing that comes up when you wake up to the sight of a massive smoke plume from your bedroom window, look to the orange-gray light that washes over everything out-of-doors and make a snap decision to venture outside as little as you can get away with today.  I had set the alarm early enough to get myself somewhere at 10:00 am.  Now the goal wasn't so much "pursuit of happiness" but more along the lines of "avoidance of asthmatic seizure".

But that's alright, there's a lot of happiness right here at home.  At the start of the year a friend and I began a Proust reading group -- we're taking about a year-and-a-half to read the entire "In Search of Lost Time" cycle.  We meet the last Monday of every month at Skylight Books in Los Feliz.  Late this morning I finished the stretch that we'd set up for tomorrow night's discussion.  Two happinesses out of that today: first, getting the "required reading" read, and, second, the reading itself.  Today, the last sequence of Part One of "The Guermantes Way", the narrator's annoyance with his grandmother taking so long in a park's bathroom facility and holding him up from meeting up with his friends, not yet aware the reason he was being inconvenienced was that she was having a stroke.  How I admire and enjoy Proust's ability to put us inside his own consciousness at that specific moment while, side-by-side, both-at-once, enabling us to see the failures of the consciousness in that particular moment.

Another happiness of the day -- lunch!  Breakfast was perfunctory, but lunch was pure pleasure.  Several days ago I'd made a from-scratch roasted green salsa and cooked it with diced potatoes and scallops.  Now I used some of the leftovers from that as a salsa to accompany a cheese and green chile tamale.  The pleasant blandness of the tamale with the spicy lemony-tang of the salsa...joy!  And that with the both-at-once quality of scallop-brineyness with potato-earthiness...well, few things can put me as firmly in the here-and-now as the immediate sensation of good food.  Much can be said, much has been said, about food as a form of self-medication, food as an obsession, food as sublimation, but much can be said, has been said, will be said, about food as alchemy, food as connection, food as something that can put one smack-dab in the present moment in the healthiest, happiest way.

That's enough for now.  I can feel my attention span shortening..shortening...gone!

Thanks for inviting me into this process, Dan!

--Mark Sprecher