Tired, tired, tired

I can barely remember not feeling tired. I remember that there was a time when I wasn’t and that that time included me doing all kinds of exciting and wonderful things. And that it also a time when I could be as languid as a trail of blue smoke from a Gitanes cigarette in hot, sultry-still room.

Part of my tiredness certain comes from working hard, travelling quite a bit, and from the heavy early morning rains (it started at just before 5am today). Some comes from the bandwidth I give over to wife and child, leaving me little of my own. (I think it’s inevitable, not simply me being a martyr.) But I’m also head-spinningly ill. Some kind of bug is doing battle with my guys and there’s pretty much a full-scale war raging inside me right now. Pretty sure I’m winning but it’s exhausting. I came into work because (a) there are few external noticeable symptoms and (b) I have a funding meeting which I don’t want to move for fear of losing the opportunity of new funds.

Running through my mind (top flow – oh, I really like that term, just made it up) are the following:

Grimes singing Genesis live on Jools H and dancing in the Oblivion video; memories of a drunken Chris on a late night bus home asking strangers in her squeaky Grimes child-like American voice, “excuse me, sir, would you mind signing my notebook?”; the bush in the garden we called – ach I can’t remember what name we gave him (I want to say Hemmingway or Socrates, which are close); a hot and huge parking lot at Tuttle Crossing, Columbus Ohio, with Roxanne – no special thing happened then – it just came back as a memory; bad clothes and my fast cars; ice cream stand in Delaware, OH, across the tracks; the smell of my house in summer – the intense wood, hot air of the attic space (it was a 1870’s house, brick and wood); the incredible summer light and heat of the spare room where Jen and I made out one day/night and day again; cancelling my cell phone contract in the departure lobby of Columbus airport, on my way to Philly and then London, leaving the US forever; the blossom of cherry trees, when I was a boy in Notting Hill, when walking to psych training in Waterloo, when walking with my daughter; the poem by Paul Celan, Psalm, and the lines,

With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

Image above via: http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m31cc94vtq1qzl0f0o1_400.jpg

My Old House, Delaware, OH