bad sysiphus

I've mentioned this before. I've mentioned a lot of things before. I'm no good at making my own meaning out of life. I'm prone to sitting and staring into space with a low-level hum of anxiety vibrating just under the surface. Today the heatwave is gone, still warm, but not dazzlingly hot. I'm reading Joan Didion's "A Book of Common Prayer," a terse, beautiful, depressing novel set in a fictionalized South American country. SK reminds me, daily, that I've been shaped by the Southern climate of my youth. I am, for lack of a better word, tropicalized. Slow. Dreamy. I thrive in heat. I also thrive in cold, in crisp autumns and snuggly winters and wet, windy springs -- but it's the heat I find essential. It's the heat that resets my annual, inner-clock. I identify with the tropical characters in this book I'm reading. I identify too much with the protagonist who leads, according to the narrator, the least examined life ever conceived. Obviously, I lead an examined life (often publicly examined, as here) -- but there's certainly room for more. Diligence is necessary. Why wasn't I born rich? I would be so good at lounging in the sun, smoking and drinking in hot, tropical bars with fans spinning overhead, faux-philosophizing with other ex-pats on an endless bar tab, wallowing in the same existential crises that currently animate my less affluent, less tropical, less drunk life here. Instead, I will rise from this computer, put on my shoes, pack my bag and drive my poor, battered car to the dollar store at the Lloyd Center Mall to buy bingo prizes for the bingo we'll play at work tonight. SK and I did not win megabucks. I will not quit my job today. Nothing spectacular will happen except the continuation of life in this body, the breathing in and out, the beating heart, the digestion and excretion and all the miraculous functions -- the spinning of the earth on its axis and in 24 hours I will be in vaguely the same spot, thinking the same thoughts, being the same me. Which could be worse, I suppose.