.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

I’m looking at the word sometimes.” that has appeared in the tool bar with that period and quotation mark. It is supposed to be the word “lenitives” without a period or quotation mark in the tool bar. I thought I had copied, with my cursor, the word “lenitives” from the site where I had come across it, but instead what the memory of my cursor, so to speak, somehow held, was this other bit, or this fragment of a bit, that I suppose I had formerly copied, this sometimes.”

And struggle though I did, I could neither recall what text I had copied this sometimes.” from, nor could I fathom why the cursor had failed to “pick up” or “recall” my “lenitives,” a word which, by the way, my spell checker doesn’t respect as legitimate, and which somewhat validates my not having known about it.

So now I faced a choice, which was: did I return to the site on which I’d found “lenitives” and renew my attempt to capture or copy it; or did I rather enter the word “lenitives” manually into what I want to call the “tool bar” or “entry field” or “slot” or “search box” perhaps, which would require a repositioning of my feet and a return to an upright position, so as to make the keyboard accessible to both my hands; or did I (also manually) retain my relaxed, non-upright position, while typing it out with one hand, which is to say, with one finger, which besides being awkward and exposing me to observing the tedious slowness of hunting and pecking with one hand, I would have to reflect at each moment on the sloth that had brought me to that impasse, which would obliterate finally any shred left of the conceit I may have had that I was doing something or working on something; for a person couldn’t be working on something while typing with one finger, with ones feet propped up on the desk’s edge, even if one might protest that ones real work more involved a mental process that had occurred before the typing. (I wasn’t working and had never worked, I was made to reflect — for I had never thought. Something like this cursor was blinking was how I produced words).

I selected with my arrow icon the tab on the page on which I’d found “lenitives,” whereupon the page in full appeared, as did the post in which the word had been used. I struggle to recall at this time if the word remained highlighted by my cursor but I know I became puzzled afresh upon seeing the word in what I had come to think of as its native location, as to why my cursor had failed to “grab” the word on its first attempt. I was tangentially, superficially, aware at this time also of the content of the post from which this word had been extracted. It concerned, as I recall, assessing the health complaints of nineteenth century correspondents in the light of modern medical knowledge. The word having been entered, I went to the wiktionary tab where ‘theirs’ had previously been looked up — yes, I will still find myself looking up ‘theirs’ on occasion — rather than to the one in which I’d pasted sometimes.” in the entry field or slot, then changed my mind and reverted to the wiktionary page with the sometimes.”, the origin of which I now suddenly recalled. The definition of “lenitives” was the plural of “lenitive,” and the definition of “lenitive” was “a pain reliever, an analgesis, a laxative.” The origin of sometimes.” had been a fragment of a quotation of Cynthia Ozyck’s I had somewhere come across; it may actually have been on my own blog

Story. A man falls instantly asleep whenever he takes his watch off and puts it on the night stand by his bed. It is just as if the puppeteer had suddenly dropped the puppet.

However, the man always forgets to take the watch off. The watch has become such a part of him throughout the course the day he has forgotten its separate existence on his wrist.

So he spends hours and hours in bed tossing and turning each night (probably even consulting the watch a few times to see just how many hours he has tossed and turned) before he remembers, in a flash, “the watch…!”

He takes it off and falls instantly asleep.

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“It was really the world that was one’s brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world.” Lorrie Moore, Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People.

Sequel to “Romance in My Mind” has occurred.

Received a post card from Dad, who is in Amasyna — spoke with R about the Trinity — asked if he thought there was anything at stake for his religious beliefs if he understood the trinity properly or not –he replied yes, he thought so.

Set out to purchase (making a list): coffee, soda, a frozen diet meal, parmesian cheese, beer. Purchased: coffee, soda, a can of spinache, a bottle of parmesian cheese, a can of refried beans, a box of rice, a tooth brush, a bottle of beer. I thought, in the supermarket parking lot, “let there be actions, let there be no ideas!” then as the doors of the market opened I thought –”let there be only ideologies without actions, let doing be utterly occluded by believing!” (then my thoughts turned to the navigation of the store.)

A square of dark air touched by a closed store’s lamp lay over the white packaging the white parking space line and the part of the curb I could see (night scene from the parking lot). The “clicking noise” I’d heard had turned out to be a small, curled-up ATM receipt, pushed by the wind into the over-sized receiving area of the parking space. The improbably loud sound was still coming from it. When the leading edge of the receipt struck the pavement […] it made abnormally loud sounds. (written.)

Bag held: a frozen pizza (boxed) frozen french fries (in a cold wet bag with white red packaging); an onion; a thing of broccoli (a club, a floret). The onion and the broccoli each in a transparent plastic bag I’d taken from the roll that was above the shelves stocked with mushrooms (“with brown soiled mushrooms stocked” “with soil-sauced mushrooms boxed, wrapped and racked” “with dirt festooned shrooms — attuned“) (written) a hook on the roller grabbing at a cutout space, or perforated space, in the bag so that it tore off cleanly from the roll, tore off from the cylinder of wrapped plastic, of which it had been a part.

Somehow never occurred to me that “puppy” and “puppet” might be related. From Latin pupa, “girl, doll.” “Pupil” meaning “student” and “pupil” meaning “a part of the eye” are also from that root. Fascinating: “The eye region was so called from the tiny image one sees of oneself reflected in the eye of another.”

“When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked in November 2024 to become the next health secretary, public health experts worried that the longtime vaccine skeptic would wreak havoc on the fragile business of vaccine development. Those fears are beginning to come true…” NYT

“It’s a different world when you start discussing vaccines,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said last month. “There is almost like a religion there.”

“There’s never been a president with zero interest in protecting the natural world until Donald Trump,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University… NYT.

Don’t know anything about the E.U. of course but maybe there needs to be a U.S. of the E.U. A country willing to take the lead.

Raskolnikov is a great example of a very smart, very moral person who talks himself into doing something very wrong. It can be done.

Good from Mother Jones: “Trump Has Betrayed the People of Coal Country. They Love Him Anyway.”

A fun Frogs production.

David French: “MAGA is governing as if they will never lose power and they are keenly aware of that.”

Q. What am I doing when I’m “trying to remember”? When I form my hand into a fist, when I kick the stone, when I lift the box, I know what action I’m performing — but when I’m trying to remember, trying to think, what action am I performing?

I suppose I no more know how I am forming the fist than I know how I am trying to remember; but because I can actually see myself forming the fist, I am more certain that I’m actually doing something.

Also: there may be an analogy between telling myself to remember something and telling myself to run faster… Sometimes I tell myself to run faster and I can’t, don’t. Sometimes I try to remember and I can’t, don’t. (Sometimes I tell myself to stop running and I don’t, same with memory. “If we could only forget…”)

Similar: realizing the box is heavier than I thought and so I will have to exert myself more — can I exert myself enough to lift this heavy box? … That is like — can exert myself enough to remember what that guy’s name is again? Sometimes yes, I can summon the strength to lift the box — to remember the name.

Similar: what about that period of life in which, relative to now, my strength had seemed boundless with respect to all kinds of things? In those days it had been other boys that caused me to identify the limits of the strength I could exert. Why, despite my trying, could I not run as fast as those boys?

I can see why Dostoyevsky’s publisher (as reported by Frank) reacted positively to The Eternal Husband, which draws you along like no other Dostoyevsky I’ve encountered. Very well structured.

Pannicle: membrane, from Latin for small rag. “Pannicles of frost” (Wallace Stevens.)

Aniconic: Of or pertaining to representations without human or animal form.

This was a great press conference Senator Mark Warner gave, of which this snippet, by no means the most important, is yet of moment.

Medieval villages were surrounded by woods, the word “desert” once could refer to forests. People travelled a lot, in spite of poor roads, because no one really owned anything or had a reason to stay anywhere.

I remember it now, on the side of the road: it looked like a big black snake coiled up in the curb and in fact it was a big black dead snake. That was weird.

The hope I suppose is that, by wandering back and forth over the same stuff, it will all cohere into a sensible whole, but in fact familiarity is the opposite of theory (and wandering doesn’t cohere).

Coming out of the woods I’m beginning to suspect my problems are mainly of a personal nature.

A house fly I have sequestered in a bathroom I describe as being “the size of a fist” but it is really only my imagination that makes it seem so large, my imagination that makes me run and duck from this “flying fist.” (It really is big but closer to the size of a large bean.)

Usually when I feel like stopping for no reason in particular, it indicates that there is a particular reason for my stopping that has not yet emerged; and so it proved today when, not 30 minutes into my run, my legs really started to hurt.

Somedays, though, you don’t feel very good and think you’ll cut it short, yet it never feels bad enough to justify stopping, and so there you are, hours later, still running, without it ever having felt pleasant.