Friday night confessions

Whenever something gets cancelled, I feel like I’ve gotten a piece of my life back. Even if it’s something I’ve looked forward to or was sure to enjoy once I got there, once it was happening. Probably it’s because I spend so much of my life doing and doing and doing, so I crave those moments of nothing. And I hate them, and I crave them, so I make plans and cancel to construct these sweet little pockets of blessed empty, I sit there and think, 10 minutes. An hour. A whole gorgeous open evening and then the agitation and the soothing something, something, something. And listen, I spend most of my time doing things I want to do. I’m a rare, blessed bird in this way. We cleared up most of the Christmas decorations, or my wife did anyway, pretty soon after the holidays. But dangling amid the vines from one of our hanging plants is this cardinal on a spring in ice skates. No matter how I’ve positioned him he ends up looking out the front windows at the boulevard. He’s halfway camoflauged so she missed him and I love him. All day he sits there, sometimes bouncing a little if he’s knocked by the occasional watering arm or someone turning the switch on the wall sconce. He’s my hero. My little plaster idol. It’s a horrible snowstorm out there tonight supposedly -- the presentation I had scheduled for the morning got rescheduled which is almost as good as cancelled, better in this case since on the other side of the presentation is maybe six month’s rent and a dent in my tax debt. You see what I mean. The snow’s actually light but steady, hard to say if we’ll make the foot and a half predicted. In any case I had this bath and my wife is out with her friend for his birthday, he wanted to play the harmonica in a blues bar open mic. A lot of things tonight got cancelled for the snow, but that show went on. I got this bath and another week to think about my PowerPoint. It’s hard to see the snow unless you look at the lamplight, then there it is. A million somethings falling. All the air, almost nothing. Not an inch or snippet of the moon to be seen.