Early morning Barton Springs swim report

No go, third day in a row. I’ve had a bad run of luck lately which has interfered with my swimming, though I mostly get there two or three times a week. I had a car accident which kept me moored for a little bit. No swimming during the Austin freeze. Bad luck, I see I wrote: I am both terrifically superstitious and adamantly unsuperstitious; I don’t believe in any of it except what if it’s true? Mostly I don’t observe any superstitions. I gave up any wishing on objects—stars, birthday candles, 11:11 on digital clocks, and especially white horses, those equine assholes—though in the dark in my car on the way to the pool I find myself trying to tell my fortunes by traffic lights. The less I have to stop, the better the future. I don’t run red lights but I do sometimes creep forward at 1 fph, waiting for them to change.

The stupidest superstitions linger. Last week, I put my capacious after-swim sweater on backwards and inside out. Everyone knows it’s bad luck to correct such a thing, so I kept it arsey-versy, even though I was headed to HEB afterwards. I was trying to hedge my bets, having felt recently so unlucky. I don’t think it worked. Among other things, this week, I was felled by a case of food poisoning, which is why I didn’t swim on Friday; Saturday I was catching up on the things I was supposed to do on Friday. Today is the Austin marathon, which I had forgotten till I was in my car. I followed detours this way and that until I hit a road block that defeated me, so I am back home on my sofa in my bathing suit and my giant green sweater, dry and unexercised.

Once again I think: I should write here more often. My day job is taking up an extraordinary amount of my time. Some of that is pure joy: anything I do with students, teaching my graduate workshop, working with writers on theses, reading work outside of class because I like it. There are few things I like better than reading other people’s fiction and describing it to them. But the rest of it has been a bit exhausting and befuddling and I can look at the stretch of the semester and see that there is not that much time for writing. But writing is like anything else, and if I exercise a little—write here, for instance—I am likely to get used to it and build up. Those incredibly irritating marathoners who fucked up my morning began with a single step, after all, one that didn’t resemble a marathon in any way except its forward movement. I don’t mean this in any inspirational way. It’s more like a bug bite, which, as we all know, itches more the more you scratch it. This is me, trying to bit myself. This is me, scratching.