when you only ever move halfway toward acceptance you never arrive there

Like both of my parents, I have a hard time keeping my living space clean. The cursed blessing of full-time work had, for brief while, led to a slight improvement simply by preventing me from being home all that much; but by mid-pandemic I had scarcely left for months and had not an iota of structure to compel remediation of the gathering storm. The return to work, welcome as it has been in most every way, has begotten equilibriation but not remediation.

A longtime friend got wind of this last week and offered to help me clean. I think this is one of the nicest, most caring things anyone not related to me has ever done for me. We didn't have a whole lot of time and hence didn't get very far, but we certainly got further than I had gotten on my own; and of course the mere fact of our appointment did compel me to get started on my own a few hours early. "Momentum" this might be called in the prevailing therapeutic argot. Except that the only momentum I am capable of torquing myself off of is the kind that lives out here, in the shadow world of ideas and discourse, and potentially (though recently not so much) in what a certain dreadlocked mandarinate has dubbed creative music. (As opposed to...the other kind?)

So, having now over the course of the prior 48 hours burned through a coupla hundred pages of moderate-to-heavy book-reading, having harvested choice nuggets from a baker's dozen emails-to-self re: a wide range of journal articles and other online blather, and having prepared and formatted almost as many future blog posts on all manner of pseudo-scholarly topics so near and dear to our ongoing project here, I do find it very, very, VERY difficult to accept the interpretation that I have been unproductive this "weekend" simply because I have let the apartment cleaning and a few other mundane errands fall by the wayside yet again, just as they always have for me and, for the most part, for my parents too. And I find it equally difficult to accept the interpretation that I am not "ambitious" just because scholarship and creative music don't pay the bills. In fact my ambitions may well kill me, same as for a good capitalist or prospector as for an artist or scholar; or if they don't quite kill me, they certainly will take their revenge in any number of mundane or quotidian ways. Which is to say, they already have.