Usually the natural world doesn't attract me, but I have urged myself to pay it attention. There is a meadow beyond my bedroom, the one I recently walked past, where deer occasionally gather, especially in the early morning, and other animals, chipmunks, mice too small to see at a distance, or tiny creatures who can't be seen even close, and there are grasses, weeds, trees, bushes, boulders, stones, and pebbles, and these I can also see from my window, creating an overall impression, usually indistinguishable in my mind from other landscapes, and often I try to recall those, especially if the ocean figures in the scene, but my impression of the ocean doesn't vary much, though the image of the Mediterranean is bluer, calmer, than the Atlantic, which is greener, choppier, than the Penobscot Bay, which is imperturbable and pellucid, but these descriptions lack sufficient detail and prove what a beggar my memory is. I also easily forget what I have just seen in the distance out of my window, a constant view for months, even on this morning, since it's not imprinted the way exacting events, histories, faces, and stories often are, and the landscape around me, encircling me, the so-called outside world which I hope to understand but often can't recall, is mostly a vague picture, as general as most terms denoting it. I look at a tree and exhort myself to remember a specific leaf whose odd shape and burnished colors appear unique, because I'll never see that leaf again, I tell myself, but then I forget it, remembering just the admonition not to forget it.
I place the radio on a white shelf close to the bathtub and find a suitable station. I will rest in the tub as long as possible, but I can rarely lie in hot, oily, even salutary water more than ten minutes, because I quickly become restless when nothing happens, and nothing happens in a bathtub, though something might crash to the floor, or I might be jarred by a scream outside the bathroom which would excite my curiosity, but inside the small, white room, it's quiet. I worry that I can't relax, as my skin is vexatiously hot and my forehead burns. The voices on the radio are melodious, mellifluous chants, but also they drone on, irritants, their human interest stories inevitable and inevitably self-serving, since human beings invented their humanity. Some speak piously, some humbly, famous ones blather about their movie, book, music, and the voices communicate one message or another, occasionally slipping into rants, and I am rendered mute by the demand to be heard. Everyone wants to be heard, most don't want to listen. Under the oily bathwater my body lightens and floats, defies gravity, and is only a shadowy impression of its form. I scoop up handfuls of bathwater the way I did when I was a child, while my dog sat by the side of the pink porcelain tub, ever watchful. My fingers open wide, the water cascades down my body the way it always has, and I lie there as long as I can, minutes pass, I don't know how many, but then I can't stand it and leap from the bathwater as if scalded, grab my towel, click off the radio, let the water run down the drain, wrap the towel around me, wash the tub, because the bath oil, which rose to the top of the hot water like fat, has left a ring of scum around the sides of the white porcelain tub, epidermis, and maybe some dermis, with its enriching collagen that dissipates daily, and, scrubbing the porcelain, I feel annoyed by the tasks, things I mustn't neglect, which are expected of me here and elsewhere, and which clutter my mind when I mean to free it, since the weight of the world is a burden. I am here to shuck it off, almost required to do it, otherwise I won't feel well, do better, achieve a goal, and I must accomplish what I'm meant to do in life, there must be something. I carry everything back to my room, with a sigh of regret, because it was pleasant but also an ordeal, a lot of bother for fifteen minutes. Still, I'm cleaner, even if my skin is slightly greasy, but in some way I'm refreshed, my flesh is pinker, hot to the touch. I'm not soothed in my mind, though my body has been hammered by heat, not the sun's, which can be deadly, though I prefer my pores to be opened by steam, steam baths and saunas are preferable to ordinary baths, especially after swimming in the ocean.