It’s a bit like the old days: long stretches of unallocated time and the vague seeping fear of impending limits. The long-feared Deathly Job never came to permanently pluck the flower of my budding artistry, but I’m good enough at manufacturing impediments on my own. I have to sit down and finish a comp syllabus this week, and it’s been like the dream of a hill that you can’t climb, not even in a lucid dream, because your mind has knots to unravel elsewhere. I don’t know what the knot is. I haven’t been working on the book—I worry that there’s Thalidomide in the air, that it would lose its fingers. So I cleaned the bathroom. And the difference between then and now—without which I don’t know where I’d be—is that now there’s someone to come home and notice that the bathroom has been cleaned.
