being no-one, going nowhere

Sunday I woke up with black existential angst, which I can write about cheerfully now that I’m no longer in it. I stayed in bed -  what else is there to do when life is empty and meaningless and you are a hopeless chocolate - addict who can’t even  stop herself reading bad fiction? 

Why do I feel guilty for doing nothing? Sunday should be a day of rest. 

I made a cup of tea and kept reading the big fat novel I was half way through, even though I wasn’t really enjoying it. Why didn’t I dump it and move on to something more inspiring from the pile beside the bed? All descisions are too hard.

I moved to the hammock on the deck. But all the while felt vaguely guilty about my sluggishness, like I was avoiding something, some monstrous, amorphous To Do List, perhaps  (Write Novel, Get Career, Become Enlightened, Try Harder). 

Or maybe I just wanted to avoid thinking about the terrifying fragility and fleetingness of ...everything. I felt annoyed with myself for persisting with a book I found crude and cliched. Why was I persisting with it? Partly because the book  - ‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsliokas - has been universally lauded and awarded. Am I missing something?

Anyway, the day unexpectedly blossomed into a delightful one when our friends Z and M dropped around with their daughter A. We had morning tea out on the deck, and they end up staying all day. M (who is unwell) lay in a sunlounge in the shade. I made another round of tea. Then D and I threw a salad lunch together.

The kids went down to the beach, then hung around upstairs reading Simpsons comics and playing Scrabble and  listening to the Hilltop Hoods. We adults lazed around rocking eachother in the hammock. Time slid sweetly past. D brought out his ukelele and we sang silly old songs. (Liberty Valance, I’m a Believer, Runaway, run-run-runaway....) 

We laughed about those stupid guilty feelings and life being so empty and tragic. We happily Did Nothing together all day, and we all felt that it had been a special, rare and precious day. We had fish’n chips for dinner and watched the  sun set over the ocean.