October 22 2021
I wake and lie in bed for a few minutes, wondering what time it is, then finally turn and see 5:59 on the clock. C. asks, “What time is it?” I lay for a few more minutes, thinking about the morning: I have to send a work email, and I have an early doctor’s appointment. Should I eat breakfast or wait until after?
It’s a much-needed day off. For the weekend we’re going to an old mansion that’s been turned into a hotel, with hiking and art installations and things on the grounds, in Illinois. I’m in a new job, and it’s been pretty good, but I need a break. We normally take a long weekend for our anniversary, typically in New York or Chicago, but we’re still being Covid careful. So this will be a mellow weekend of some hiking and reading and hanging out in (hopefully) pleasant, novel surroundings…
I finally haul my creaky body out of bed at about 6:20, send that work email, and open Facebook. I’ve been spending almost no time on FB lately, except a couple minutes a week for work and one check a day to see if I got any messages. Today, for no reason, I open it and read maybe 10 or 20 screens of posts. What’s on there? Humble brags (not always that humble) by writers and scholars (not judging: I do it too); political cracks (mostly about the labor shortage, including a link to the Chronicle article about Michigan State asking faculty and staff to volunteer in the cafeterias); food photos; people expressing sadness about this or that; ads.
My phone buzzes with a prompt to check in for my doctor’s appointment, which I did last night. Annoying.
Then at about 6:30 I hear the alarm go off in the bedroom—classical music—and I open this file and start writing. C. pokes her head in the living room and says, “What are you doing in the dark?” “It’s diary day,” I say. Now she’s showering, and I will get myself moving….
6:50-ish
I brush my teeth while C. finishes showering. On the toilet tank are: a book of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, a book called The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future; and Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I think about what reading material to take for the weekend, laughing at my tendency to bring six books on a weekend trip and look at, maybe, one.
My mind is busy while showering and dressing. Among other things I muse about Facebook: this morning, under the link about faculty being asked to work in the cafeteria, someone posted some snark about university administrators (ahem). A response came to my mind, but I did not think about actually posting it. So, while showering, I remember, back when Congress was passing the Affordable Care Act, getting into angry arguments with people on Facebook about it. And again right around the time of Trump’s election, calling out an old friend for turning to insults, like calling people “Snowflakes.” I cannot imagine myself engaging in this way now. My disengagement from Facebook has been good for my mental health. I am still tied to Twitter, and probably spend 10-20 minutes a day on it. I find out professional things on there, but easily 50% of my Twitter feed is academics of various ranks and levels of (or distance from) precarity, complaining about Academia. Which I don’t love.
By the time I get out of the shower it’s
7:10 and I’ve dawdled enough that I need to hustle to get to my doctor’s appointment. By 7:20 I’m in my car and on the way to the Dr.’s office. It’s gray and just starting to get light and the windshield is covered with mist. The doctor’s office is 10 or so minutes away. NPR is on the radio—a story about a married couple, immigrants from India, who rented out apartments in the building they owned & lived in in California; didn’t get paid rent during the pandemic; and have not been able to get any relief from the government. And, at the half-hour, the headlines, including the daily report that progress is being made on a massive social spending bill but we don’t know when it will be passed. I’ve been detached from the news for the most part lately, listening to it on the radio for 5 or 10 minutes a day then switching to podcasts (I’m in the middle of one about Jung and one about Bob Dylan) during my daily drive.
Outside, light mist is in the air but it’s pretty warm and not unpleasant. There are two other patients at the doctor’s office, one a South Asian guy with long black hair, who’s checking in in front of me. I check in and sit down. They’re being Covid careful so the waiting room is widely spaced; in normal times chairs would be close together and there would be 10 or 20 people here. An assistant walks over to the S. Asian guy and says, “You answered ‘yes’ to the covid question. What symptoms are you having?” “Sore throat,” he says. She discerns that he’s vaccinated, and says, “OK, I’ll let her know.” I half-consciously pull my back towards the wall. He’s easily fifteen feet away.
I’ve been going to this same doctor for 20 years. I like her a lot. I think she was born in India but moved to the U.S. at a very young age. She’s very kind and friendly and competent. This morning she seems busy; we’re usually chatty but not today. She writes me a scrip for an x-ray for my hip pain (at least partly the effect of my hour-long commute to work, which I’m doing more frequently in my new job); and advises I get a Moderna booster when they’re available. (The CDC just approved the boosters yesterday). My blood pressure is 109/64. I text this to C. and she texts back an emoji of a flexed, muscular bicep. I’m home by
8:10 and slice up some roast chicken and put it, with some spinach and mayo, on a baguette; slice up an apple, and sit on the couch eating it, C. at the other end doing the same. We start chatting after 10 or 15 minutes—about the news (Alec Baldwin shot and killed someone by accident, one would think, on a film set). I look at a little sheet from the visitors’ bureau of Monticello, Illinois, (where we’re going today) listing restaurants and shops. There’s no rush to get on the road, so I write this until
9:14 then get up and pack for the trip. In my backpack I put two recent New Yorkers, Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (a massive, devastating novel about the political horrors of the 20th century) and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?, another in her series of novels about female friendships among intellectual millennials in Dublin.
[Textual note: the rest is reconstructed from hand-written & phone notes taken during the rest of the day]
At about 9:45 we’re driving through a light steady mist. We realize we need gas and stop out near 465 on the West Side of Indianapolis. Parked in the lot is the Harold’s Chicken Shack truck. A large man in a flapped hat walks by carrying a small piece of cardboard cut in the shape of a house. I guess that he’s going to beg on the median of 38th Street and that the cardboard says something about homelessness.
We jump on I-74 and drive, through areas I’ve not been to before—or have been to perhaps once—but of course it all looks familiar: corn stubble fields, grain elevators, slightly rolling here, more flat and relatively treeless and prairie-like there. We pass a pocket steel plant in western Indiana, and a large barn door with white stars on a blue field that reads “We the People,” and I wonder what that’s meant to signify in this political moment. (Probably a paradoxical libertarianism?)
After we cross the border into Illinois, we see “Burma Shave” style signs—you know where a message is spelled out in a series of signs–for an organization called “GunsSaveLives.com.” Some of the signs were overgrown with trees and bushes so this meant I was reading quatrains with one line missing. “Roses are read/…/I feel safe/How about you?” [Coming back on Saturday, one read: “I have a gun/It’s pretty and pink/It makes the bad guys/Stop and think.”]
So, yeah: America.
A little before 12 we stop in Champaign, IL, for some provisions, darting from car to store in the cold rain. Then we drive to Monticello, IL, where we park and check out a cute little bookstore and a couple schlock-filled “antique” stores. (Fake retro-looking old coke signs, kitschy tchotchkes, that sort of thing). At the bookstore I buy a copy of “Best American Poetry 2021.” We walk, in light rain, to what the chamber of commerce flyer describes as a “tavern,” but I don’t especially like the vibe, and the food looks fried and fattening and not especially good, so instead we go to the town Mexican joint, where the beans are distinctive and excellent, with an undertone of coffee or perhaps cocoa, and I also get three small, excellent carne asada tacos: success! This takes us to about 2 o’clock, and we drive from there maybe 15 minutes to the Allerton estate—the former mansion & grounds of a wealthy industrialist’s son, with formal gardens and statuary and hiking trails.
Our room is in the Gatehouse, which is bigger than any house I’ve ever lived in, but also kind of damp, its funk incompletely covered over by quite a lot of Pine Sol. But no biggie—the attraction is to hike on the grounds and loll about in the gardens. By 2:45 we’ve settled in and are walking the length of the formal gardens. These are maze-like classical-style gardens (though with apparent Chinese influence); and of course it’s late October so almost nothing is in bloom and the overall palette is brown-ish green. Individual gardens are built in shapes-within shapes (rectangles inside squares, circles inside rectangles—kind of like mandalas), and many have sculptures, including an avenue of statues of chubby Chinese musicians playing lutes and recorders and things, and a wide quadrangle of purple, chubby dogs on narrow pedestals. Overall I’d say that Mr. Allerton had better taste in gardens than he did in sculpture—but I would also note that I have much less of an eye for gardens than I do for sculpture.
The mid-afternoon’s rambles end at the café, inside a large greenhouse, where we buy salads to take back to the room for dinner and sandwiches for tomorrow’s breakfast, sitting outside on Adirondack chairs in the (already far-declined) sun and drinking coffee while the kindly cafeteria lady makes our food. While we wait I look at an abstract, geometric sculpture that consists of the outline of a cube in steel pipes (or aluminum or something), with the top of the cube cut out and raised above the rest. It looks kind of interesting from a distance; when I walk up close to it, the paint on the metal is uneven and it, I don’t know, doesn’t look great. I look at the placard and am surprised to find it has a website address and is for sale. I guess they keep a mix of permanent and temporary works cycling through here. Back in my chair I notice a “no weapons” sign at the entrance to a bathroom across the narrow quad, just underneath a “we are a smoke-free campus” sign.
By about 4:30 we’re back in the room and chat and loll about; I read a couple poems; then around 5:30, the sun is out, and I suggest that we go back outside and find a sunny spot, while the weather is good. Which we do, along the stone wall of one of the square gardens, on a stone bench. The sun is just barely warm enough to give you that sun-on-your-face feel. The sound of a confused voice comes from C.’s back pocket—she’s butt-dialed a colleague. They chat for 30 seconds and laugh.
Back in the room, we sit on one of the beds and watch TV (I don’t remember what, nothing memorable) and eat our salads, also not memorable. Afterwards C. flips channels and I leaf through a New Yorker, reading the cartoons and a review of a Jasper Johns joint show in Philadelphia and New York—and observe to C. that we might be able to go see one or both of those at Christmas time.
Later, I open Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? and read the first five or six chapters, sliding easily into the Irish-millenial-interpersonal world she constructs so convincingly. C. continues to flip channels on TV: this is on a cheap satellite plan with about 20 channels or so, a lot of them, it seems, those marginal high-number channels that play 60s and 70s TV; I look up from my reading to see Gunsmoke and an old Johnny Carson episode. (Swear to God! Carl Reiner in a leisure suit! Oh, the lapels!) C. eventually declares that she’s going to sleep, and I take the remote and surf, bleary-eyed, finding nothing of interest, until I fall asleep myself.
Thus concludes an actual true day off, on which I: sent exactly one email; took no work calls; consumed little news; managed to spend much of the day without thinking of the roiling shitstorm that is this moment in the history of the Earth.
A good day, in short, but one that has little to do with Middletown, which I did not visit today, and almost as little to do with everyday life—as this was a day spent out of its current—the way small-mouth bass in the Delaware River would retire into these still pools near the shore at evening. (I’ll abandon the metaphor there, because it doesn’t end well for the bass, since the local fishermen know of this propensity). However, as Lefebvre would point out, the concept of leisure and of a “day off” is itself a product of everyday life as capitalist modernity has constructed it. Sort of EDL.
So there you go!