A footnote on my Life from 35 floors up

Working here, 35 floors up on this silly computer making certain lists agree with other lists and then making new lists that help to both confuse,streamline and dovetail all previous lists is certainly an exercise in futility. Yet, it does give me time to think which may or may not be a good thing.

Mainly, today I am think of how very tired I am and how much I achingly miss my pillow - - your pillow - - any pillow, hell, I'll sleep on the floor under my desk. But it is a good kind of tired that comes from a decent sober sleepless night filled with discussions, bliss, understanding and a certain amount of contentment that can only be achieved by just such a night.

(I really do like the Arcade Fire album....I wasn't sure about it but I feel more secure in that thought now.)

My mind is troubled with thoughts of War and tsunamis and the Bar Exam. I am also thinking a lot about Susan Sontag dying and what an interesting writer she was with an interesting life. I recall reading Illness as a Metaphor in college and then writing this stellar literary critique of contemporary literature (so lofty we are in college). I remember sardonically remarking about Sontag's Illness as a metaphor in only a footnote. It is not that I disagreed with Sontag, I merely saw the inevitable irony of trying to escape using illness as a metaphor and the trappings of such devices within an essay which refers to the kingdom of well and ill and some such things. Metaphor upon metaphor piled upon each other in either an attempt to defile metaphors as a whole, urge more careful metaphorical use or simply and ironically point out the absolute truth of how we do use illness of a metaphor and how that makes the ill feel. Sontag herself died of cancer yesterday after waging a 30 year battle against the disease or perhaps not waging a battle at all but living for the last 30 years of her life in the kingdom of the ill and reporting to us from that vantage point.

Sontag for me raises memories of college and crisp fall air, staying up for hours writing papers that were due quite soon, and running across campus to the comp. lit. building to turn in the paper with the footnote to my saxophone playing, cigarette smoking professor who wrote a book called 'On Drugs'. That professor loved my half-baked attempts to be witty and the way in which I admired all the authors I quoted, challenged them and thought of them secretly as friends (at least within the confines of the pages which we share). Inevitably this professor greatly affected my life by showing me that one can go against the grain and achieve happiness or some close facsimile of it. This lesson I so need to learn and do learn again and again. He was the kind of professor who waged one man revolts against the faculty by moving his desk into the attic of the department in protest - - - I am sure he is still waging his quiet wars and giving students a reason to show up for class. His assignments were often wacky but always stimulating and allowed me to find something to love about school again after I had thoroughly bored of the ancient English department. The English department at my university offered nothing but scorn to its students and almost zero encouragement. I was on the verge on believing that my English B.A. was worthless when I encountered Paris, Comparative Literature, Susan Sontag and my super cool jazzy professor. These experiences offered me the life source that the dust of the English department could not. I drink the water of my collegiate days now in a toast to a divine and truly remarkable woman....Susan Sontag. Imagine she is barely a footnote in a paper I wrote in college, but her effect on my life was so profound that I will miss her pen as it will now and forever lie still.