I was having a rather sour day until at two o’clock I decided to walk to the store to get some ice cream. At the intersection with Fremont Avenue, Willie drove in front of me and stopped his truck to say hello. Willie is the old hippie who lives on the next street from me and sells his crafts from his booth at the Saturday Market. Today he told me he’d had shoulder surgery and hadn’t been able to drive for a while. I don’t usually run into him because I go out very early mornings, while he walks his dog Rosie around nine or ten o’clock. So I was glad to see him, and afterwards my mood was better.
From there I moved on to Community Market and bought a quart and a half of pistachio almond ice cream for $6.59. This part of the trip was not extraordinary, and there was hardly anybody there this afternoon. But I came home and ate about half the container and then shared two bites with Aesop. Back on my own street, I noticed a lot of robins in front of my house and Lenore’s house next to it. And a man came walking down the street with his little boy and, when I mentioned the birds, he took out his earbud and asked me to repeat myself. I did that, and he said something stupid.
Right now, the sky has cleared partly and the sun is out. My day was depressing a while ago because I reflected that most of my life is imaginary, like living in a dream, and like characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays. But I believe I was being hard on myself for whatever reason, and just kind of down on life and myself. I don’t know why, exactly. I think it has something to do with having left the church; probably I feel bad about it. Without those people, like Tim and Dan, I have no one to argue with, hence nothing to do all day. It gave me direction to have a debate going with other real people. But now, they have released me and kind of dismissed me from their minds. And in effect I’ve lost a lot of friends.
However, I just couldn’t fake belief at church services anymore. It was dishonest and unfair of me to do so.
Oh well. You win a few, you lose a few. Sometimes being honest entails paying a price. The only good thing about it is that I feel right about what I did, in an ethical way.