Reality on Every Side

I lived under the mistaken impression, yesterday, that I was cleaning the house, only to discover, at the very end of the day, that actually I had been sitting in a chair reading the Internet. That actually the whole house was worse than ever. Usually there is at least one room that is sort of picked up, for the most part. But now it appears that every single room in the entire house has thrown up on itself. The only thing I did do, in some kind of distracted fit, was dig through the coffee cup cupboard and discover that the reason no coffee cups fit there is because half of the cups that belong at church have come over here and taken up their habitation in this place. So I will have to go find a box or something, and carry them all back. Although I suppose I could have the children take them over one at a time. If you've been anxious about your favorite Sunday morning mug, not being able to find it for instance, it's because someone brought it over here and shoved it in my cupboard. And I'm very sorry. And hopefully this tragedy will never occur again. Except that it definitly will, beginning even today, when Matt gathers to himself a cup of coffee and brings the mug back over here with him.

So anyway, I am going to have to suspend a lot of my hopes and dreams today and actually clean the house. I shall have to go down to the laundry, which I just did a few days ago, and do it again. And then I shall have to pick up my own clothes and put them away, all the while gently screaming at the children to pick up theirs in the same way. I'm going to have to plug in some earphones and turn up the volume very loud and go look at the school room, and definitly put all the things away, and throw away another measure of broken toys and ruined paper, a full measure, crushed down, shaken together, overflowing all over the place. And I shall have to look at my desk, which has a small but imposing mountain of urgent business sitting on it. At no point during the whole day should I sit down in my chair, the dog sprawled on my lap, looking for some joy and happiness on the Internet.

To take your mind off all my troubles, here are some pictures of the children on the Fourth of July. You can see they were very happy and delighted about everything, including the fact that they were all wearing red and blue with notes of white. I wore black, because that's how happy I was feeling about the great tragedy this country has turned out to be. We dutifully ate hamburgers but it was a mourning eating, a going through the motions, illuminating thereby to your interior how little there is to celebrate.