After receiving last week’s bad news, I desperately attempted to keep some semblance of normalcy in my life. For example, last Sunday I drove over to Berkeley to attend the city’s “How Berkeley Can You Be?” parade and festival. It sounded like it could be an afternoon of great fun, and I had expectations of displays of outrageousness from the citizenry there…reminiscent of the annual “out-there” behavior exhibited during the Eugene Celebration.

Now, perhaps it was my state-of-mind, but I was pretty disappointed. There were a smattering of laughs and “Berkeley-like” folk around (see the accompanying grandmother-for-peace photo), but my experience of the event was quite different from the all-out kind of effort that Eugene (for example) puts into its identity-defining celebrations. It seems to me that Eugene is more Berkeley-like than Berkeley is these days! Who woulda thunk?

My mood for this last week has been semi-dark. I seem to have been struggling with continuing issues of loss and change…or at least that’s the best explanation I have right now for the cloud I’m living under.

On one of my early-evening walks this week, I was trying to enjoy both the sunshine warming my face and the music coming from my iPod when, all of a sudden, I found both my hands clutching my chest as if I had pain there. But, it wasn’t really pain; actually, just momentarily, I was gasping for breath. I guess, maybe, I’d been forgetting to breathe. How weird.

But given my thoughts, not really too unusual. I had been dwelling on the loss of a friend to cancer; and the losses of jobs, attachments, familiar sights, and highly-significant people in Oregon: in essence, evidence of a total lack of control. While the changes I’ve made have also brought me meaningful gain, it’s the losses that have been my preoccupation. So much is gone. So much different.

This last week, I’ve been in a sleep-walk, a trance, moving in slow motion. As if this life I call mine is only some kind of surreal caricature of another’s.

Soundtrack Suggestion

While I was watching you did a slow dissolve…
Did I imagine they held us hypnotized
Did I imagine or do the walls have eyes…

Life in slow motion somehow it don’t feel real…

Snowflakes are falling I’ll catch them in my hands
Snowflakes are falling now you’re my long lost friend

(“Slow Motion” – David Gray)