A Dilemma as Now

Latin Deli & Grocery, Main Street, Peekskill, NY

Some mornings I am as blank as a sheet of paper. There are no words in me—not for lack of desire, but because my mind wakes numb. I rise late, without having done anything so exciting the night before that might justify it. Just too much rum and beer, and not much else I can recall. There were voices all around me—so many—and I drank more just to drown them out. All I wanted was solitude, but I wasn’t alone.

Is it moodiness? Perhaps. Today, I feel without purpose. On days like this, it’s easy to forget your schedule, to postpone everything and be quietly grateful it’s not one of those days spent in an office for eight or ten hours—pushing paper, making calls, sitting in meetings when your mind has nothing of substance to offer anyone. You show up in body only. The paycheck’s the only thing that really arrives.

It’s a gray June day—the sky overcast, and a chill lingers despite the humidity having tamed last night’s biting wind. I think about that last bottle of beer—the one I didn’t really want but enjoyed all the same. A dark, tasty Brooklyn Brewery brew. It outdid the Colombian one I picked up from Latin Deli, the one I shared with a friend who never stopped talking. But that was fine—I didn’t want anything else in that moment. Nothing more than the bottle emptying. When they insisted the night keep going, I just said, “I can’t,” and went home. That was enough.

Today, I’m reading The First Part of Goethe’s Faust. Someone gave me an old copy. I’m tucked in bed with a bowl of homemade chicken soup, and I’m struck by these lines in the Dedication: “The austere heart feels itself growing mild and soft. What I have, I see as in the distance; and what is gone, becomes a reality to me… I know how the spirit of people is propitiated; yet I have never been in such a dilemma as now.”

Moody is the day. But reading in solitude somehow suits me. In this quiet fog, I’ve made a kind of peace.

Walking around Sleepy Hollow Golf Course in Scarborough on Father's Day did little to improve my moodiness.