The keyboard never is at hand

Again

I'm stuck with the pen

Neighborkids screaming, unhappy at each other

and their mother

shouts, to no end

I pull the headphones on - "Alone in Kyoto" track by Air from the Lost in Translation soundtrack

Alone in Alturas ... drowsy and a little down - will I ever sleep well in Sylvia?

But yesterday woke to gloomsnow and cold, cold

Today is bright, brisk, bluesky and gustwind buffeting
Sylvia

and I within, and dogApple, catGreta

who sleep well, wherever they lie

11:54, "Armellodie" by Gonzales

***

Reading Murakami, What I Think About ... When he runs he listens via earbuds to Lovin' Spoonful, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding. I rush to download the music - soundtrack behind a novelist's mind. Once I read a Nicholson Baker novel wherein the showering protagonist contemplated the satisfying shape and heft of a bar of Basis soap. I have used Basis soap ever since.

***

Has the childrens' discontent reached critical mass? I lift the 'phone off one ear to listen. Angry shrieks. Headphones secure again: Mike Oldfield, "Theme from Tubular Bells."

I have finished reading another wry story in The Grim Smile of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett. Now I take up the wrecked secondhand hardcover volume of Memory Babe, floppy in its cracked binding, and slide back under blankets, lids drooping.

At this rate nothing will be done.

Stephane Grapelli, Chapeau Blues.

Rain all night through, whitenoise on trailer roof, turning to whitesilence midmorning, that peculiar hush that brings one to the window or door to (astonish) fat falling flakes cascading draperies snowgauze across streetscape & trees. Lovely lovely, & so cold here in Sylviatrailer. Should go to house but this is sweet, just catGreta & me under downcomforters & iPhone radio droning ambient tones.

I dreamed of Stiller and Meara (remember them?) in old-age home, settling into their little room together & the mean unheeding nurse. Stiller, Meara - the famously unsuited pair, she tall thin Irish, he short stout Jewish, famously funny. Now in my life - Stillinger, Mills - more unsuited husband and wife could not be imagined, she tall exhippie earthmother Asperger hermit, he short excokespoonwearing Armanisuit executive horseplayer worldtraveler. Brought together by circumstance in late life to age together. Not so funny sometimes, not famous at all, but happy couple mutual support, and pray - keep the mean nurses away, far away.