Monday, March 23

I awaken from a dream about living in a wall tent dormitory with an unexplained desire to listen to Scott Walker. I put Scott 3 into the CD player and brew coffee to the discordant strings of "It's Raining Today." 

In 1996, my brother and I were obsessed with Razor & Tie's Scott Walker anthology of the same name. I remember the two of us sitting in my car outside the Fisher Building in Detroit, grooving to "The Old Man's Back Again," before taking the elevator up to the studios of WJR-AM. We were musical guests on The Mitch Albom Show, an honor that involved being completely ignored by the two co-hosts and frantically self-editing about 20 seconds of live performance into the gaps after commercial breaks. We never met Mitch, who was broadcasting from the East Coast that day. After one of the breaks he made fun of my falsetto which I admittedly overused back then. I still think of this every time I see one of his books in a grocery store checkout lane.

All day I'm beset by abstract weariness. I yawn self-consciously through my morning class and subsequent errands. At the vet I pick up a prescription for Trazodone, hoping it might curtail Islay's destructive chewing. I suspect it’s just boredom, but I haven’t ruled out seperation anxiety. Bolstered by two naps, I work steadily all afternoon and through most of the evening, eyeing bedtime as my just reward. When I finally turn in, I revive a credo from a few years ago and say out loud "my favorite part of the day is right now."