The worst thing is the tedium.
Where are the screams and metal twisting and building collapses that go with other catastrophes?
At least it would kill time to watch something burn down.
It feels like some kind of major disaster but there is no sound, just a massive yawning silence.
Silence as big as a whale.
The biggest whale you could imagine, bloated on krill.

It’s just one thought but how can the largest mammal get that way being such a picky eater?
But soon the others come back.
So heavy to make the head loll,
That burst through the door of the control room and say, We’ll take it from here fellas.
And not just the head.
Your whole body is weighed down into the bed long after the alarm.
Well it’s not the blankets keeping you there you idiot, they weigh less than a watermelon.
Roll one into a ball and see.
Into the shape of a watermelon.
Seat it next to a real one, pick one up and then the other.
Shape and size has nothing to do with heaviness, it’s the many particles that make it.
And there’s always too many of them to remember names and birth dates.

There’s no way to weigh this though, only in the days and weeks and months that it’s taking.
I think of all the other wonderful ways we should waste a life.
Knitting.
Fly Fishing at dawn.
Learning to order food in Creole.
I’ve never done any of these but I miss them, somehow.

August 2009