the Indian Ocean always felt yellow to me

... so I'm back in my regular writing routine. Which reminds me somehow of my swimming routine, which I am also back into. A few times a week I drive to the Ashfield Pool, a blue rectangle amidst acres of concrete, full of kids and parents this time of year; but the central lanes in the main pool (there are four or five others if you count the polo pool up the back, only used for the sport) are reserved for lap monsters like me. I wet my googles, put them over my eyes, press them a few times until suction is complete then slide into the water at the shallow end and begin ... up and down, up and down, breathing every three strokes on alternate sides, until I've covered twenty lengths. At 50 metres each length, that equals 1 kilometre. Takes about twenty minutes. I don't hang around afterwards, I wander off in a pleasant trance, an endorphin haze and go about the rest of my day. The writing routine is similar, I make various preparations, trivial but essential, before sitting down at the keyboard, opening the document, scrolling to where I broke off yesterday ... and begin, going from one side of the screen to the other then back, the lines like laps although I generally do more lines than I do laps, maybe a hundred, I don't know, I don't count ... sometimes I lose my rhythm and my stroke, sometimes I choke, sometimes water gets under my goggles and I have to stop and make adjustments. Some days it is so hard I wonder why I bother, other days I swim like a dolphin, my style achieves that beautiful up and down forward undulating wave motion that is the ideal of all swimmers ... but there is always resistance, always a kind of dullness I recognize as duty - to what? Health? Fitness? The mere accomplishment of a distance I've decided to cover? It doesn't do to dwell on this feeling, this boredom of resistance, because it is always there and will only get worse if I think too much about it. Some days I have no idea what I am going to write, or perhaps I will have a word or two to go on with, perhaps a whole sentence. Most of the time I'm not satisfied with what I come up with (though later I might be) and though sometimes on a quick go through when I've finished I'll find ways of improving, or adding to it, more often I chop things out ... then I just leave it. Time was I used to make a point of re-reading every word of the day's work later on but I don't do that any more or at least not early in the process ... too (potentially) destructive ... if I feel like it I might but not as a rule. Sometimes half way through my swim, which always takes place after I've done my writing, the way forward, the next bit, or something completely serendipitous will drift into my head on the endorphin tide and then I might turn it over and over until the next day's stint begins ... or alternatively I might forget all about it only to find it mysteriously surfaces when I sit down to write ... the other day in a book I read that the root of the word trance is fear but that isn't borne out by my dictionary, it says it comes from marrying the Latin trans, across, with Latin ire, to go, giving us departure, leaving behind, crossing over, going away somewhere, you might not even know where ... with the laps I always end up in the same place, with the lines, somewhere else.