Mark Carroll's Journal

I slept unusually poorly last night, I woke up before 3h, after a dream in which my mother came in and, knowing her to be dead, I took the opportunity to give her a big hug. I don't recognize the room from real life. She wasn't ghostly or suchlike, I was curious as to how she could be there, acting normally. I awakened, laid in bed awhile, eventually got up, looked online, watched a light show, laid in bed some more, then the alarm went off. I got through the workday okay but recorded only 7½ hours, coming home a bit early. I won't do much tonight, I hope to get an early night, then sleep rather better. Tomorrow, after work, I shall hang out with my neighbor.

President Biden is currently visiting Cornwall, a county I spent my second decade in. This evening, I also happened to open a recipe book that, among other things, includes a photograph of a place I have walked many times, part of the harbor in Mevagissey, also in Cornwall. Last time I lived in the US, my parents lived in Cornwall, so I knew that I could easily return to familiar people and places. Now, not so much. People have gone and, for various reasons, my ready access to places has too.

Lately I have been reminded of people, places, events, that I wish were not now firmly in the past. Just a couple of hours ago I used a flashlight that my mother bought me in Columbus, Ohio. It's strange to have all these specific memories and nothing to do with them except miss the things associated with them. Many of those memories, nobody in my life shares with me. Some of those that involve my parents, I wish I had thought to convey my appreciation for while they were still alive.

New things will become familiar and welcoming, displace some of these thoughts of the past, I am just not there yet. Once I have been here for a few years, I will know places and people and will have done things that I remember with some fondness and they will remain accessible. I settled into life in Ohio well but that was not during a pandemic while unexpectedly hemorrhaging money for myriad home repairs; right now I am having a family of raccoons removed and barred from the attic. Once this round of work is done, the house will then need rather more setup on my part before it becomes a comfortable home. Integrating somewhat into a community takes some time and money that I don't have and won't soon but hope to someday.

Yesterday evening I watched Artemis 81 (1981), the special offspring of what failed to be a British-Danish coproduction. Unusually for me, I think there were crucial holes in exposition: later reading explains connections that my relatively attentive watching missed, leaving my experience more of a sequence of bizarre transitions, elements that appeared to come from nowhere then go nowhere. Perhaps the television movie is a wonderful, profound, artistic contribution. From my perspective it became more of a hilarious misfire, a cautionary tale in unnatural dialog and in something between incoherent plotting and inadequate exposition, the latter perhaps reflecting poor editing. Despite its entertaining absurdity, I don't plan to give it another try.

Perhaps surprisingly, I am glad that Artemis 81 was commissioned. It came from the toward the end of an era in which the BBC made a lot of fiction that would probably never been funded otherwise. It took creative and technical chances. Sure, some fell flat, but the others sure compensated. I fear that the current BBC makes itself irrelevant in its eye toward profitability via BBC Worldwide and similar. It is fine to make popular shows but revenue is a poor guide for public service broadcasters. Not everything worthwhile needs a large budget and the point of a legally mandated license fee is to provide social value in balancing out commercial provision. When I was a child, the BBC seemed to know that, even embrace it, just as I embrace Mark Fisher's, It is the BBC that made and broadcast Artemis 81 which should be recovered and defended, not the institution as it currently functions today.

At one point in Artemis 81, just after the headless horseman, we see a tall, thin tree by a pile of dirt. I think that it may have been some kind of black poplar. In traveling the English countryside I often see such trees planted in rows. For me, they're one of the signs of my homeland. As for the period, it was strange to see the world of my childhood, filled with Morris Marinas and suchlike.

In thinking of the past, I was also reminded of the author, Colin Wilson. Given his glasses and interests, I wonder if the writer-protagonist of Artemis 81 could have been inspired by him. As a teenager, I often drank with Colin. In later life I have gained understanding and confidence that could have helped me to talk with him more about his ideas, perhaps better addressing what Artemis 81 struggled to touch. Colin is another of my life who has passed away, so the possibility is forever lost.

( In some ways, my daily life is figured out. )

( I got rather less done at work today than I had hoped to. )

I believe that the situation with the house is what weighs on me most. I am less confident in myself, having managed to buy a house that, unnoticed by the inspection, needs so much further work. Sure, it was recently remodeled (and priced accordingly), but so incompetently. I can't arrange my environment to fit how I want to live and what I want to do when various rooms still need work, currently the central living area and kitchen. It feels interminable and costs so many thousands of dollars, I am spending much faster than I earn it, and, on days like today, I don't feel worth my salary anyway. So, I suffer double imposter syndrome, both: can I be good at my work, and do I even have the life skills to use my inheritance wisely. Also, spring is coming and I will soon have to apply money and attention to the kudzu-choked tall trees, not that the inspection mentioned the kudzu.

( I think I am rather more unlucky than incompetent. ) I remain many steps back from where I had expected to now be, and where I am now is hardly comfortable.

With showers with a fixed head, rather than it being on a flexible hose, I have wished it were easier to get the water where I want it. For the fixed-head showers at the end of a bathtub, I now realize that one can just leave the drain stopped during one's shower then reuse the water to take a bit of a bath afterward to make sure everything's finished up properly.

Incidentally, the bathtubs in my house seem a little short and wide in comparison to what I am used to in Britain. I suspect them of being a little short also by current American standards, possibly because one of the bathrooms is the original from the 1940's floorplan.

Christmas alone is being easier on me than Thanksgiving was. It may help that I had more chance to prepare for it. For the Cornish hen I mentioned, I put a large onion in and around it; I forget the onions too easily as I keep them in the pantry that not much else is in. These seem to be of one of the kinds that I can cut without tears. I got to see my family online again, it reassures me to see them all doing well. I watched a little festive programming from local network affiliates and even Her Majesty's message for Christmas. The fruit cake is good.

On the way back to Knoxville tonight, I switched the radio over from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and listened to Pink Floyd instead, and the pandemic and local infection rate warrants my keeping to myself. Being alone for the holidays has had me positively avoiding them in some ways but I now notice myself better tolerating the reminders. I do not have much of an idea of how to spend the little time off work that I will take but perhaps there could be something seasonal nonetheless.

Today is my first work week and it turns out that we get both Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving which is most welcome as I could use that extra time around my new house. I am accumulating a backlog of chores as I try to make it into a home and it will be great to have those extra spare daylight hours to make progress with them. Intellectually, I know there is light at the end of the tunnel, that in a few weeks' time I'll be further along, living in my home and having far fewer to-do's remaining, but apprehending that emotionally is a whole other thing that might require more of that progress to have actually happened. A good start was that my morning pre-work chores went fine this morning, that augurs well; now I have my reusable facemasks soaking in soapy water.

It is a relief to have my driving test behind me given that Tennessee gives only thirty days' validity to my overseas driver license. The examiner was friendly and reassuring and the resulting paperwork reveals that my short road skills route was the abbreviated rather than the extended one. Perhaps my Ohio one was too, for that segment was similar. I wonder who gets the longer. They knew I had turned in an expired Massachusetts license.

I learned more about the history of my new house. It was originally government-owned, one of the prefabricated alphabet houses (mine's a type B) built for the Manhattan Project workers, mine in 1943; the residents got better rations, deliveries of ice and coal, etc. In subsequent decades my house was extended considerably, all of sideways, backward, downward, but much of the original structure remains clear, including the fireplace with working chimney, which is just as well given that the air-source heat pump may not be optimal on the coldest days.

My current day-to-day life takes the form of muted worry: I attend to simple day-to-day tasks and relocation steps while hoping that all manner of moving pieces land squarely. Yesterday evening, it made for a nice change to find myself both smiling and laughing. I watched the speeches from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and, while I doubt that they will face anything but intransigent hypocrisy from a Republican Senate, I smiled to see the winning team happy and speaking against anger and division. Perhaps a little divisively, I also found myself laughing at the losing team making their press conference, in the car lot of a landscaping business, a paradigm of incompetence.