I took a couple of days off to get up to speed with some things that were threatening to slip away from me, but it's turned into a little bit of a post-apocalyptic scenario here in my little flat.  I've been out, and I've been talking to people (mostly but not only via email) but for some reason — maybe I've been too immersed in my work — it seems like I'm the last man on earth.


And for some reason I've chosen to stay in my crummy little flat instead of commandeering the Governor's Mansion, which you'd obviously expect me to do in a real zombie apocalypse.

OK, yeah.  I hadn't mentioned the zombies.  I'll get to it.

Yes, I've been feeling a little isolated the last couple of weeks.  I've been known to shut myself in certain times of the year, forgetting advice from my many Shopenhauery friends to, whatever else you do, get out for a goddam two-hour walk every day. 

Forget Oprah, that's the real secret.

Old Schope was famous for his daily walk.  As his biographer R.J. Hollingdale relates :

From the age of 45 until his death 27 years later Schopenhauer lived in Frankfurt-am-Main. He lived alone, in ‘rooms’, and every day for 27 years he followed an identical routine. He rose every morning at seven and had a bath but no breakfast: he drank a cup of strong coffee before sitting down at his desk and writing until noon. At noon he ceased work for the day and spent half-an-hour practicing the flute, on which he became quite a skilled performer. Then he went out for lunch at the Englischer Hof. After lunch he returned home and read until four, when he left for his daily walk: he walked for two hours no matter what the weather. At six o’clock he visited the reading room of the library and read The Times. In the evening he attended the theatre or a concert, after which he had dinner at a hotel or restaurant. He got back home between nine and ten and went early to bed. He was willing to deviate from this routine in order to receive visitors. 

Aside from "rooms" and maybe the flute, I'm basically there already.  Like four years ahead of schedule.

Schope's walks weren't about "health fanatacism", either.  It was, according to Hollingdale, "simple obstinacy: he would go out and nothing would stop him. It is a minor manifestation of that rooted immovability of mind" that served him so well in those twilight years.

Sometimes obstinacy is exactly what's called for. 

And sometimes it's not. 

But that daily walk.  That walk will save your life. 

Last couple of days I've been a slug.  A very busy slug, but a slug. 

It's probably the tail end of winter that's to blame, compounded by choosing a battle or two better left for another time. And because I'm not getting out properly, things have been getting a little videodromey, too. You know what I'm talking about, right? It's like there is something a little sinister under the thin veneer of shared reality that once you're not sharing it with anyone ... did someone say zombies?

Well, it's not always zombies. Sometimes it's... giant hairballs.

A couple of days ago I cleared what I thought was about a hundred years worth of hair — none of it mine — from the drain in my tub.  It was sort of on a whim.  I guess it'd been draining a little slow, and I guess I had noticed that there seemed to be some hair clinging to the drain guard. It’s not the kind of thing you want to do, but one day you just end up doing it.  It seems like it's gotta be done.

Well, once I started pulling, it just went on and on. And by the time I had extracted what I thought was most of it I had the equivalent of a wet, slimy, hundred year old rat carcass made of human hair on my hands.  Much of it literally on my hands.

And, turns out, that was only the half that I could pull out of the drain. The rest ended up lodged too far down the drain to do anything about.

So now the drain wouldn't drain at all.  Which is the lesson of dislodging a hundred year-old hairball. 

There it was, somewhere in a kink in the pipe, too far back to reach without a snake.  Mocking me.  I could feel that clog, that Frankenstein's monster of human hair from a hundred past tenants, mocking me, my tub now half full of dirty water determined to turn into a cesspool.

And so began a two-day battle royale — mano-a-hairball.

A steady regimen of Drano didn't seem to be doing any good.   The hairball fought back hard, in its sinister, silent way. 

And then, one day (Monday, actually) I woke up and checked on the hairball, and it was gone.

The tub was drained, a little battle gore remained but was soon enough washed away.  I took a shower, and for the first time in two days I didn't have to stand in a foot of water to do it.

What did I learn?

Sometimes life is grim, but it's still ultimately just a big hairball comedy.