The Isolation Journals - Day 19

Lazy Sunday.  I gotta admit, I've never been able to fully embrace the idea of a Lazy Sunday.  Even now, when Monday is essentially meaningless, I just can't get down with the idea of doing zero productive things. 

Is it guilt?  Is it a need to justify my existence?  Is it just that I have to leave the apartment to walk Charlie, so once I put on outside pants, I might as well just keep the ball rolling and actually do things?  I don't know.  But a Lazy Sunday sounds great in theory:

Today's prompt comes from novelist and essayist Esmé Weijun Wang. 

Prompt:  Write about a time when you (or your character) experienced something that may be a common human event (for example: scratching an itch, sneezing, petting an animal, etc.), with concrete language that brings the experience to life. Try using all of the senses in order to avoid cliché.

[Proust's madeleine moment is provided as an example]

...[my mother] sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?

---

Road Soda

I lead a cautious life.  I am risk averse and generally rule-abiding.  But on occasion, for no discernible reason, I grow (to my mind) careless and bold.  Yesterday was such a day.

In mid-afternoon, we set out for an urban hike.  On impulse, I yanked open the fridge on our way out.  I grabbed a Sierra Nevada beer and jammed it in a koozie.  "You want one?"

"No," Andy replied, regarding me with bemusement.  "Is it legal to drink on the street here?"

"Only on Lower Broadway, so no," I answered with a shrug.

Down on the street, I gripped my contraband in my left hand, waiting for the perfect moment.  When I pulled the tab, the sound echoed in my ears as a thunderclap, announcing the arrival of my storm of deviance.  

The yeasty aroma wafted out of the can as I raised it to my lips.  The first tentative sip emboldened me further.  The bitter, foamy rebellion surged down my gullet.  In that instant, with the sun on my face, and the birds chirping unseen behind glorious neon leaves, I was transported.  I wasn't standing on a desolate street still pocked with last month's tornado debris, but rather beside a turgid spring roaring with snow melt in the High Sierras.

The mountains are calling, and I must go.