Don’t Blog Like My. . . .

Lately my days have filled up with obligations and infinitesimal gaps between them, so that there’s little productive to do in the cracks. I find myself getting to bed, weary and conscious that I’ll have to get up early next morning, and blogging has fallen off my radar altogether. I feel like Tom and Ray Magliozzi saying, “You’ve wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk. . . .”

I should acknowledge right away that some of the errands and obligations are my own doing, so I can’t moan at the world. Tonight, for instance, I voluntarily watched Road to Perdition. The family was suffering from Netflix Constipation: you know, the time when you have all three movies out, and you really want to see them, but just now you’d like something else, but you can’t get something else from Netflix till you return one of the three, which you can’t, because now isn’t the moment to watch those three movies, and so on. I had sent for three relatively somber movies, because (at the time) Margaret was away and Pippa had just been on a comedy spree; I felt I was clear to watch a couple serious flicks without upsetting anyone. But (as John Belushi used to say) “No – o – o – o – o – o. . . .” I got sidetracked for a couple of days, and Margaret came home, and she usually doesn’t like heavy movies as much as she likes light movies, and that goes double when her endocrine system is playing malignant games with her mood. So Road to Perdition, Gangs of New York, and Donnie Darko sat on the dining room table, waiting for someone to have mercy, watch them and send them back to their DVD homes. Pippa sat at the dining room table, thinking that those DVDs could be Austin Powers or Batman, if only Dad would send them back to Netflix so her choices could come. And of course, any day I could simply have mailed them back, and put them back into the queue for a later date — but that would be giving up.

Anyway, my notions about marriage have to wait another day.