So many things were happening all around me—a whole new world was opening, and i didn’t know how I was going to keep up. Get up earlier? Work more hours? But in general i seemed to need ten hours of sleep. That meant, for me, sleeping from about 8:30 to 6:30. But i’d woken up early the past few days—would i have the energy and the ability to concentrate that makes it possible to do math and physics? Getting up earlier didn’t make a lot of sense if i was going to find myself losing the thread and staring off into space—making everything take longer anyhow. But who knows? The ground was shifting a little, and, yes, now that I was working on writing songs with music, I didn’t feel at such a loss when I thought of my musical ex. In general, I think it’s awful to encounter any ex—even in a picture; that’s because, for a long time, they didn’t exist, and, then, suddenly they do—and you can’t help but think—“who adapted better—who made something of themselves?” You see a photograph—you don’t always know; but they gradually gave off the impression, anyhow, that they were just djinns, or spirit enforcers that you had to treat as real, but, ultimately, in most cases, weren’t exactly real unless you wanted them to be. In that case, you were often forced to suffer in order to validate their existence.
I’m not saying you had to suffer a lot; but anybody, in the end, could turn out to be djinn—your character and your story would change to fit that evolving reality; so you had to suffer a little (at the hands of an energy sucking djinn) in order to protect yourself and your loved ones—to keep them real, and to keep yourself real; great suffering wasn’t in the cards, though. The kind of suffering i mean is the mild kind that pays off over time by making us wise and more likeable. When we keep our eyes on the prize, then, in that way, our suffering often doesn’t feel like suffering. We can be perfectly content.
Now, my scotch uncle was trying to get in on the counting process which was pushing me out a little—or making it possible for Ursula to talk to some particular side of me, but i was trying to keep Ursula on the line—going back to her to make sure she was there – waiting to see what kind of information my scotch uncle had to share. But i was kind of trying to stick to the plot of this book, which was mostly about Ursula, not every different person or voice that I used when counting or chanting. Now, I was doing my best to pay attention, but I had gotten up around 4 this morning, and I was a little spaced, and my scotch uncle was beginning to prove a little distracting—as if he was saying: “what is this four or five day break you’ve taken from writing your math and physics book? Surely that remains important.”
He wanted to talk to me; so what was i doing? I guess i was subconsciously trying to let him in on what I was doing, so that he could get a more rounded picture both of me and himself. Math and physics can get a little obsessive at times, and there are often points at which you want to know something, but to understand that, you wind up having to learn something else, first. And that can go on for while, which is why, I think, it’s important to do other things, too—to let everything breathe so that you don’t wind up burning out or doing poorly. Nevertheless, I hear him, and I planned to get back to it soon. If I wasn’t too spaced I might even try today, since I had extra time on my hands because I’d gotten up so early, and, honestly, I’d done hardly anything but music stuff for the past three days. But, to be fair, I had, over the course of the last few months, been sidelining some of my writing in order to focus on my math and physics, so everything was balancing out right now, and, it seemed, everything would work out fine.
So how was Ursula? I asked her, literally, and she said she was showing off her body—but to whom, i don’t know. She might’ve been looking in a mirror, or admiring her legs—I don’t know. i’m showing off my legs. I figured she was wearing a knee-length skirt, or thinking of it, which was a good look for her, not all the time, since she looked good every other way too, but some of the time, since women that wear nothing but pants-suits are annoying. But it’s true—i was drifting a little from getting up so early, and I just kept seeing an image of legs (white legs, i think) in my mind’s eye. I think Ursula was telling me that she likes to paint, or, at least, she likes to look at paintings. That was great, since my paintings were one of the only ways I had of connecting with others in a modest, meaningful way—i didn’t expect people to get into my novels until they’d gotten to know me through my paintings first.
Therefore—although doing a painting might not have seemed as important as mathematical discovery, it was crucial, in fact, for me to reel people in as a stand-alone painter—I needed numerous paintings, enough to compare with our most prolific artists. The benchmark I was chasing was 2000 paintings. But I wanted to go beyond that if i could, which meant sustained growth over a long lifespan. i noticed you’ve been muting the metronome—and, yes, I’d been so involved with getting acclimated to the songwriting program that I’d most likely spent long periods of time falling short of my sustained counting. That was okay—and I was probably doing it a little subconsciously, anyway, but I wanted to get back to my “metronome” as she called it, or, you might say it was the other way around. Counting had become so second nature to me that it almost felt like the metronome was on when I wasn’t counting, and muted when I was—especially since I used vowels and counted in such a way that I matched up with my breathing, and my breathing could shift, so, hence, the idea of muting the metronome—she was talking, now, about being president.
I was so amazed by how young she was (not with respect to having a baby, but with respect to being such a great politician—and i don’t mean that in a bad way). And there she was, at home, apparently as happy as she could be. I kept seeing that smiling, blushing face—and i think when you have brown skin you have to really be blushing to see that much color. In a way I kind of wanted to stop thinking of her in a romantic way since it was so unlikely that no matter what I did, we’d never wind up together. But, again, she represents someone else—both here and in the next life, and that was why I had no intention of changing the voice and images that I was using. That would become especially important if she became president. But, for now, suffice it to say the only thing that might change was this idea that we were actually in love with each other – it followed from that, then, that we’d end up together, which was kind of silly, since, in the real world, it might’ve meant just the opposite. Everybody has some idea of perfection and when we fall short of that we tend to see those we have lost, for better or worse.