Cold clear afternoon, amber sun blazes at the horizon.

That was an hour ago. Feeling tired, trolling for page hits, sorry I read a tweet about going barefoot at a beach shack in Key West, peeling shrimp. Which only makes me wish to do just that. Ah - sorry if I have perpetuated an annoying meme - even the original tweeter was only wishing to be doing that, though I'm sure she'll be able to arrange it soon enough.

Darling(s) (I feel so torn these days), not sure what to blog tonight. Went for two long walks, filled the house with smoke because I overfilled the tins when I made blueberry muffins earlier, the smoke still lingers - though amazingly, the muffins came out delicious.

I'm going to treat this blog post like a therapy session, because I'm feeling so low energy. So - what am I feeling? What's going on? I got up from a late afternoon nap and thought to google someone I once interned with as a graduate school planning student. And then was taken aback to see a reference to his obituary. Don't worry - I was on tenterhooks - it turned out that it was his father, after whom my acquaintance was evidently named, who had died. Which I'm sorry about, of course, though relieved that it wasn't this man who'd made an impression on me.

So I googled him some more and came upon a review he'd written of a theatrical production of The Scarlet Letter. (I'm having trouble with this post because it seems to necessitate so much explainery, that I don't have the energy for at the moment.)

I don't know - the guy had made an impression on me. Sort of like - I'm not big on "angels" exactly - but I do get this sense sometimes of highly creative, highly intelligent people, who'd be happier in one realm, but get stuck in another. The guy has a beautiful mind. He and I both worked, at different periods of time, and in hugely different capacities at the same municipal planning agency (he at a very high, but still, I think, ultimately booted-upon level, considering his creative talents).

In his review he notes that Hawthorne

wrote The Scarlet Letter immediately after losing his three-year tenure as a political appointee heading the Salem Custom House, and while he was glad to leave his position, one he found stultifying as a man who wrote he “felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the full range of his faculties and sensibilities,” he took pleasure in publishing a devastating parody of his one-time peers in the introduction.

Defining himself as a writer of a romance in this text, he felt entitled to that “full range” of “faculties and sensibilities,” and made no excuses for craving happiness. This is the man who lived in the utopian experiment of Boston intellectuals at the Brook Farm, enjoyed the company of Emerson and Thoreau, and while always hesitant to take up a cause and always ready to probe it for hypocrisy, was an active player and observer in a world where new ways of thinking, new relationships, and new gender roles were all in play.

The novel’s protagonists are all smoldering volcanoes of talent and passion...

I'm very sorry his father died - I read the obituary guestbook and he sounded like an absolutely extraordinary man of wide-ranging sensibility and sensitivity. I'm glad I had occasion to think of his son again. He's my type, my ideal in a way - though I don't know him really, never did, at all. But something in me reacted to some quality of his, and I remember to this day. And it's a quality that shone in you, dearest 1.0, and a spark - fallen angel, in the sense of being caught between two worlds - that I'm sure I glimpsed, visionlike, in 3.0. It's just that like-souls recognize like-souls - they must, mustn't they? Because there aren't so very many of us. I mean, we're around. But I'm not exactly in a circle of such souls...

Really, I apologize for this post, I'm just typing, trying to keep it going, but really, I would like to be in a shack on some sunny beach with you, only I don't like the sun so much at midday, so we might retire within and draw the shades...

Love you - each one of you.

I know I should proof, and will regret not having done so - but at the moment, I'm just too beat - plus, I'm barefoot, looking out over the waves, peeling us some shrimp. Oh never mind the shrimp. Is that a mai-tai you're handing me? Thank you darling - lean over to me - that deserves a kiss.

XOXO from a cold clear Hudson night to the North Sea to the Rockies to the Pacific Northwest

I love each of you, my darling angels

***

"... speaking of happiness, the play’s the thing, and the very writing and performing of it reminds us that we live in a world where there are men and women who meet Hawthorne’s definition of happiness: 'to live throughout the full range' of their 'faculties and sensibilities.'"