It's only Tuesday.

I did something I’m generally opposed to doing tonight.

I spent hours working on something that neither qualifies as my field nor my passion.

There’s really no excuse for this, other than my love of tinkering, I guess. And for getting shit done. I really love that.

However, book publishing requires many hands, and as of this moment, I’ve only got the two. So I had an idea for a book cover that I labored over and labored over. I traced lettering and graphics onto cotton muslin and then hand-embroidered it, which took hours (though I love to embroider). This afternoon I photographed the finished swatch and then tinkered with that photo on my computer, experimenting with layouts and typefaces.

But is it realistic to think that I, an amateur, could make a book cover that looks legit? Professional?

The chances seem slim, yet I tinker away.

In all fairness, I did pay a designer on Fiverr to create a cover for me for my upcoming debut poetry book, mentioned above. But I really didn’t like what they crafted, even after I provided feedback on how they might improve it to match my given specifications.

So, there’s that.

Do I sound negative to you these last couple of days, dear reader? I really don’t mean to. I feel like I have one foot in the here and now, another foot on an entirely separate timeline, and the difference in climate between the two is making me irritable. I sometimes feel like I’m bowling through life, just aggressively meeting deadlines and ticking boxes off on checklists, scowling and making the house shake with the speed of my gate, hands in fists, maniacally smashing the ants that have come to live on the edge of my kitchen sink…

I have almost no desire to go out after work, and little desire to see people. I’ve got tunnel vision all of a sudden, and all I want to do is write, write, write. I even have reinvigorated interest in a novel plot line (fiction!!) that I had jotted down an outline for and the first couple of chapters years ago, but had shelved for one reason or another. A dual timeline story, told by a granddaughter of how her grandmother came to find her soulmate, the two women’s stories somehow intertwined and set within the landscapes of old school (1950s) and current-day Tel Aviv. 

Did I ever mention that I tried to move to Israel in 2020? That was a long time ago, when I was a different me with a different story. Even Tel Aviv, where I desired to live (still do), was different back then, as cities are always changing, just as the people who occupy them are always changing. And what a moveable feast that city is, though somehow I feel I am digressing.

If I do dive back into this Telavivian fiction work, I’ll want to come back here and talk with you about soulmates, because that’s another topic that’s been on my mind. (I’m jumping around. Do you mind?) Forever, I believed with all my might that there was this “one match” for every Soul on this earth. But after 22 years of wandering with no such match to be found, I chucked the whole idea and resolutely focused on good looks…Many years later, Alison Armstrong debunked the mystical notion of “the one” for thousands of suffering women (and men), but lately I’ve been thinking that the Truth might be somewhere in the middle.

I can’t speak with any real authority on this yet, as the better part of my body of work has been about unrequited love. But there’s something stirring here. Something ill-content with conventional wisdom and status-quo.

Something obscured which yearns for the light.

And Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it’s only Tuesday.