To Double the Output

As I begin this post, only 42 minutes of the month of March remain. I would have two hours, except we (collective, international) decide to change the numbers on the clocks to buy more sunlight for spring days. Perhaps this is a good purchase, despite it's deception. My Italian telefonino, which is also my alarm clock, does not determine the time by satellite but instead required a manual reset this past Saturday night/Sunday morning (which blurred together in malted conversation). Maybe this blog requires a manual reset as well. Instead of opening a new post and putting fingertips to the keyboard, I was expecting some internal sensor to catch signals and react appropriately. I just kept ticking. In fact, I didn't even tick, I just subtly moved through these March days like a digital clock which silently transforms and marks the time by turning a line on or off now and then.

I really do want to write here and elsewhere. I want to be able to describe elements of this experience. There's no one way to say "what the problem was" and why I didn't write here this past month. The consolation is that my various notebooks and logs have not been as neglected as this blog. In fact they are full of jots that may or not be expanded. It is yet to be determined whether these impressions and ideas are ingredients. Perhaps as they sit on my desk they are already combining into a dough of sorts that could be formed and baked later in Virginia or Seattle in the next few months, or maybe even one day in Alaska or Paris or another imagined future. Should this dough be salted? Florentine bread is unsalted, but those German pretzels were salted, and so were the pretzels being sold on a bridge in New York City in the one dream I dreamt on the nearly restless night train from Munich to Florence. The door slides open, the curtains are pulled to the side: FAHRKARTEN! No. Wait. Which side of the boarder are we on? Make that BIGLETTI! My ticket has five punches on the bottom from these multilingual ticket-checkers/sleep-enemies.

I keep getting distracted while writing this (29 March minutes left). I've changed the music a few times. Lou Reed just said "This song is called 'Rock & Roll' it's about someone whose life was saved by rock and roll." Well dear Janey, she turned her radio to just the right station and she started dancing to that "fine, fine music." I listened to Velvet Underground this weekend as well. On a Sunday morning train. I ate a cheese sandwich on a sunflower seed roll and "Sunday Morning" played in perfect synchronistic mood and motion.

Sixteen minutes to go, and I don't know that I've said anything that might appease the people who say they have been hoping to hear something from me here. This March deadline is of course completely arbitrary, but it seems to matter (time should be saved even if the daylight is gone for now). Now that I think about it, I've noticed before the blog's clock is off, so the time attached to this post probably won't correspond with the actual time. I want some discipline in my life post-"interdisciplinary study of Western civilization in chronological and thematic sequence." I do miss those days and those people too. Rooms numbered 321 and 323. Mornings that started at ten. Walks to class in the kind of rain that does not require an umbrella. It rained today in Florence, so I didn't wear my new jacket. It rained today in Florence, so I couldn't open the window, lest the rain or a draft might come through. What's the difference between a wind and a breeze, between a breeze and a draft, between a draft and a drift? Ten minutes is not enough to say, but maybe one day I'll be the kind of woman who knows the difference.

There could be more soon. April's showers might fall here through an accidentally open window. The dough could become another sunflower seed roll. The time could be reset by arbitrary declarations or involuntary radio singals, and maybe that lost hour could be the hour of my disciplined composition, unless of course, that ticket-checker turns the knob tonight and catches me dreamily off-guard, only to toss me out onto the damp train platform where I will scribble in my notebook once again. Three to spare.