Swimming

We took Talia to swim class this morning. Arriving at the school, we pulled in next to a little Saturn that was overflowing with garbage. I’m not making this up. Something like 75% of the inside volume of the car was taken up by plastic grocery bags, coffeecups, food wrappers, etc. On the floors, on the seats, on the dashboard, around the shifter. There was just enough open space for a person to sit in it and drive the car. Unbelievable.
Inside, I noticed a lone wallet sitting on a bench by the pool. I guessed that it belonged to one of the dads in the class preceding ours, still in the pool with his toddler (which it did). It made me think of Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, the part where he relates his theory of deferred anxiety. It works like this: the trick to facing a source of major anxiety is to distract yourself with a source of mundane anxiety. Gray retells how he psyched himself up to go swimming in the ocean while on location filming The Killing Fields. To overcome his terror of drowning, he left his wallet out in the open on the beach. That way, he could worry about the wallet getting stolen.
Gray has been missing since January 11.
After swim class, we ran some errands. Along the way, we stopped at the record store to pick up a copy of Like Swimming, which I’m positive I owned at some point, but sometimes I think lose CDs like other people lose socks. These days I try to rip them as soon as I get home, so at least I have a copy.