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Sy Safransky’s Notebook
January 2011
I haven’t written in more than a week. Forgive me, O Muse, for being absent without leave. Maybe it’s the Prozac. Maybe it’s the rain. Maybe it’s because I’m too damn vain. Can’t I put down simple words and send them out the door?
January 2011November 2010
Summer is getting ready to pack her bags and disappear; she’ll probably break records for the hottest ever. Let’s hope that string theory is right, and in some parallel universe we haven’t made the same blunders, and the earth is doing just fine, thank you, and a hot summer day is just a hot summer day.
November 2010October 2010
My cat Nimbus is sick. Oil is fouling the Gulf of Mexico. The veterinarian, who makes house calls, will arrive soon in his twenty-four-foot-long animal hospital on wheels. I wonder how many miles to the gallon it gets. But with my cat’s well-being at stake, do I really care?
October 2010August 2010
Someone sent me a bumper sticker that reads, “Nonjudgment day is near.” It can’t come soon enough. For even though I’ve learned the importance of nonjudgmental awareness, I still turn nonjudgmental awareness into a goal, then judge myself for not being more nonjudgmentally aware.
August 2010July 2010
I admit it: My memory isn’t what it used to be. I forgot what number we’re supposed to dial when we see the Supreme Court leaving the scene of a crime — for what else to call yesterday’s 5–4 decision to kill campaign-finance reform?
July 2010June 2010
Just give me the good news this morning, and let me hear it sung! I want glorious cantatas. I want soaring arias. I want the music of the spheres ringing in my ears.
June 2010April 2010
I read that there’s enough lead in the average pencil to write fifty thousand words. Does that mean the words are in the lead? Of course not. Are the words in my head? Just where are they, those fifty thousand words?
April 2010March 2010
Soon I’ll celebrate another birthday. It’s too bad the earth doesn’t have a real birthday. It might remind us that the planet had a beginning and — as it circles a medium-sized star whose days are numbered, too — is moving inexorably toward its end.
March 2010February 2010
I dreamt that a beautiful stranger had fallen in love with me. The only way to find out where she lived, however, was to look her up on Facebook, which I’d steadfastly refused to join. So that’s what I get for my neo-Luddite posturing, for telling a friend yesterday that the world needs an About-Facebook.
February 2010January 2010
I’m grateful for this clean sheet of paper. I’m grateful for my Pilot Precise V7 Rolling Ball pen. I’m grateful for the genius who invented the alphabet and for all the punctuation marks that come bundled with it at no extra cost.
January 2010
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