It’s a blue day after all

June 5, 1980

It is a new day.

The sun sneaks through my curtains to disturb my sleep.

It is a devil wearing cheeriness for a disguise, too bright, to revealing, exposing every speck of dust in my life.

At a time when I need a gray overcast to cloud me over, I get brightness and sunshine instead.

And though the sun should make me hopeful and glad, it only makes me sad.

Of course, this is only my mood that paints the world in this strange reverse image, as if I can only see the film negative and need some kind of positive projection to make it seem right.

I crawl from bed, struggling as the monster I call life stirs to wakefulness with me.

Monster is the wrong word. It is some unmanageable creature, a pet out of control, a mad dog I suspect might have rabies or some other dastardly disease for which I have no cure.

I shudder at the thought of it, and think I need more sleep.

What I need is for my weary eyes to gaze on something outside myself, on dreams I still cling to, filled with thick, rich blue like a blue of a Renoir painting, so vibrant as to seem alive.

My life really is just an impressionistic painting, seen better from afar.

Close up, I’m always wishing for the more remote image to be real, and that the blue I wear was a different hue, something closer to nature than I perceive it to be, rather than this manufacture color I put on and take off.

We do make our own pain, you know.

We sit on this assembly line and stamp it out, inspect it, approve it, and put little trimmings on it, then pass on to the next and the next.

It is a wonder we can wake up at all, and that in the midst of all this self-created misery, we manage to survive, thinking of ourselves as rugged individualists because we have somehow overcome what we did to ourselves.

But it is a circular assembly line, and what we approve of this time, always comes back at us later, to re-inspect, and to re-endure, and to fix up in a slightly different way, painting on new colors that we have invented with the hope that this time it will turn out better than it did last, each bit of it filled with the endless stamps of our approval.

A brighter beam of sun pores through the window, sneaking passed the shade to catch my eye. It wakes me up just enough for me to believe the blue I am putting on, is real blue. And sometimes, that’s the best we can get at any given moment.