Author: paulattinello
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Living badly
Yesterday: left the apartment so that the cleaner could take over; had lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant. Ended up eating too much, eating wrong, feeling terrible – exhausted at the end of the day. The patterns: bad eating, no exercise, television, Internet – by the time I woke this morning I was so angry…
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The whole point
I’m enjoying this blog. It’s not a big deal, I know – mostly just small, casual writing, with the address shared with a few friends – but it is succeeding in exactly what I wanted it to do, that is, helping me to get into the habits of writing, communicating, thinking, making sentences. Even at…
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Temptations
Dinner with P– on Friday – tapas and two (!) pitchers of sangria. That’s not as dramatic as it sounds – this sangria wasn’t very strong; normally one good glass of sangria can have me giggling and inept, but I suspect this was only the wine, juice and fruit, with no brandy slipped into it.…
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Bookshelf
Enjoying Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf. He has a slightly unexpected style – very educated, articulate, intelligent – but at the same time rather stiff, with not infrequent falls into gracelessness. Perhaps it’s just because he is a design engineer, who has become fascinated with books. I get the sense that he sometimes…
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aargh…
it ITCHES. Well, it did, anyway. After much rather frantic vacuuming, washing, and a happy improvement in the weather – now merely warm rather than hot – things are finally okay…. It started some years ago – must be about 1990/1991 – the summer that Steven was my roommate. It was after Paul P– moved…
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Indulgences
No, not Catholic ones. (Always amusing to note: although my father was brought up Catholic, and my mother Orthodox, they got married and became Presbyterian – which here, close to Scotland, is a tale that brings in a lot of incredulous looks. I suspect they want to know: why on earth would one become Presbyterian…
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Secrets
Read today Gaiman’s Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch – quite wonderful. I know that in becoming a Neil Gaiman fan, I’m jumping onto a very large bandwagon, and doing so pretty late in the day – but this one was really a surprise: a slow, dense, atmospheric tour of the shadows and…
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Different
Continuing, in the night, this uneasy fascination with change, time, life – the night is still hot, the pillow still like a heating pad. It was all probably produced by the long bursts of heavy, outward-directed work of the past weeks, that have finally left me dried out, tired – in the midst of this…
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Night, heat, stasis, change
Last night remained hot – not very hot, but hot enough to reproduce that feeling of endless night, of I’ll-never-get-to-sleep, where faint noises (not traffic – something electrical? an air conditioner a block away?) and the pillow, which is only blessedly cool for a moment when you change to another part of it, create a…
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Awakening II
I wake abruptly into a dark space, responding to some dull sound, some impact, I can only sense the aftershock. I do not know where I am, a flat, low bed, no light, I reach out clumsily to find a switch, any switch: light, music, electric shocks, trying to find a way of altering the…
Paul Attinello 