Despite the rumors, my prolonged absence is not because I am busy counting lottery winnings, nor have I gone off my meds and begun the killings again.  The sad truth is that I have a complete lack of time management skills; were Mrs. Cox, my happily-remembered first grade teacher still grading me on part two of the old report card where my personal traits and skills were listed, “Uses Time Wisely” would be receiving a resounding ‘F’, if Fs can be said to resound.  The sad truth is that I find it impossible to do anything that relies on my own initiative and skills as a ‘self-starter’– particularly writing – unless I have an open-ended block of time, which means days without work.  These being two per week, I must write on either Saturday or Sunday, preferably in the morning.  Because I work all week in Smallville, then drive two to three hours on Friday to Reedville to one of the most paradisiacal spots that exists on old Gæia, and must use a goodly portion of Sunday driving back again to an apartment which has won awards for squalor, and because the family tradition of Sunday breakfast at Mom’s has been modified to Sunday breakfast with Mom but at David’s, I am reduced to Saturday as an option.  This was fine as long as snow blew and rain fell and lowering clouds made huddling indoors warming my fingers over a smoking computer an attractive option, but lately it has been Summer (you may have noticed), and the stately gardens and messuages have been a-tweet with birds to feed and watch, with rapidly growing lawns to be kept in trim, with windows of opportunity opening and closing within minutes for planting and pruning and mulching and weeding and the murder of several thousands of Japanese beetles which would rather eat my cherry leaves than mate (although from the evidence they do plenty of both), with sheds to be painted and trees to be cut, firewood to be stacked, AND all this lurking in the dark recesses of my calendar while both the hammock has been hung beneath two o’ershadowing ashes and the garden swing has been swung beneath an ancient willow. One can appreciate that there is competition for the Shaughnessy Saturday which is fraught enough to begin with, with competition from my overweening indolence.

There are little logistical things – such as the annoying fact that I have an Apple in Reedville and a PC in Smallville, and my blog was set up on the latter, meaning that none of the formatting that occurs on computer A remains in place on computer B when I actually post, so that I write on the Apple, e-mail it to myself on the PC, reformat it – I can’t write without italics, etc. – so that I require two surges of energy to get ‘er done, which, when both occur within a single weekend, is enough to blow most of my internal circuits.  I refer to those circuits which reside within my cranium; my computers seem perfectly able to cope while carrying on their rivalry which results in them barely speaking to each other.  Happily I don’t have a sex life to take up my time (Sister Mary Frowniface would be so pleased), but otherwise, I am a mass of conflicting impulses.  I have e-mailed none of my friends in months, and the energy required in dealing with the guilt is daunting.  I did start an entry two weeks ago, but it remains incomplete.  I swore I would get a blog, as well as other things done this weekend, but on Thursday I got a ‘sorry for the short notice’ e-mail from my niece-n-law Guinevere (the one with the two sets of twins) saying that she’d be in town from KY (the state, not the lubricant) for a few days, and would greatly like to see me Saturday at her Mom-in-law’s place (my brother Gary’s widow, Joan’s house) which is a good twenty miles or so from Reedville.  Well, what am I to do?

So no blog this week, either.  I was at Lowe’s garden department last weekend and was aghast to see it full of chrysanthemums.  This is the surest sign of Summer’s end that I know.  When I was young, we had a host of those brick-colored chrysanthemums in front of the house, and I was always depressed when they began to bloom because it meant school and the end of all hope for another 9 months (Usually it meant I’d be having a new brother soon, too, but that’s another story).  This week I saw a few goldenrod blooming, and even, on my trip back to Smallville, no less than four maples with an orange tinge, so I guess I’ll be having more time indoors soon.  That is, if a dream I had on Thursday can be safely ignored.  I dreamed I was having an acrimonious argument with a monk who was not supposed to leave his cell, but who became so irate at me, he did so and came right up to me.  “I hope you realize,” he sneered, “that you have only 24 days more to live!”  It was one of those dreams that kind of stay with one all day, and later that day it occurred to me that those 24 days brought me exactly to my birthday – which was a thought nearly as unpleasant as the monk’s prophecy; it would be particularly galling of Fortune to make me have to go through a birthday and my demise on the same day – a two for one dose of nastiness that would be entirely typical. 

As to loose ends, or late-breaking news, there is little, except that my first Social Security payment arrived exactly on time as promised.  Mom has totally fallen in love with her new apartment at Desolation Pines.  “They do everything for me,” she says – and then as if to demonstrate her complete divorce from reality anew, she adds, “and it doesn’t cost me a cent!”  But her memory has improved.  She is content and happy.  She has told us at various times that she lives in a school and in a church.  She even went to some church thing there where the “priest” performed the service with a toddler tucked under his arm resting on his hip.  This would be news indeed, were the ‘priest’ of the religion she imagines him to be.  They even have got her doing those senior calisthenics – although not, one hopes, during the services.  She has gained weight – much-needed – and looks ten years younger, which is still old as hell, but in a nicer way.  It is working out so much better than any of us dared hope, and she loves her visits to my house for breakfast; admires the house, the kitchen, the grounds – everything is just A-OK with her.  She even remembers being there before; she especially loves an old corkscrew willow we have in which I hung one of those terra cotta sun-faces I had when I lived in Texas, and which has begun to dissolve in the rains and snows of NY until it has this sort of goofy, leering grimace where once a smile was displayed, rendering it a surprisingly good likeness to several of my less savory cousins.  She tells us she “remembers” seeing that tree when walking with her mother which, I guess, means at the least that she is dwelling in the Happy Place. 

And so I miss another week of the old blogamy.  I will do better soon, I promise both of you.