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Ripshin Farm, Sherwood Anderson’s home in Troutdale, Virginia. (Troutdale is distant SW corner.) Previous to this, Anderson was in New Orleans and before that Reno.

Ptosis: “refers to droopiness or abnormal downward displacement of a body part or organ.” (The ptotic malevolence of his left eye – Wolfe.)

Anita Loos, author Gentleman Prefer Blonds

My experiment blew up but no one was harmed. It proved just one thing, it turns out, that I didn’t know what I was doing. Or did I?

All of these years of not knowing what I was doing, all these years of “science”; now I had to pretend I was surprised when the experiment I’d labored so long over — that is, which I’d pretended to labor so long over — blew up or, actually, just fizzled out.

“Oh my goodness, how shocking! I’ve labored so very long, what possibly could have happened?” etc. etc. I do recoil from that kind of deceit. I want to look my colleagues in the eyes and say you know it and I know it…! but my colleagues are so much better than me; for, you see, they are not pretending to do their jobs. And when I try to look them in the eyes I see they clearly do not “know it,” nor could they ever comprehend it. I see that they are too good to ever comprehend the elaborately performative nature of what I do. And they will stumble over this question most of all: if he works so hard to pretend to work, why doesn’t he just simply work? And so I will not utter the slightest complaint about my latest failure, which will seem to them a stoic and noble resignation, which of course only further perpetuates my tragic ruse.

You would think this might be a good time to take off my lab coat and trample it underfoot and move onto whatever that thing is I do actually, assuming there is such a thing? (I’ve read that what comes easily to you but with difficulty to others is where your true talent lies — and was there anything like that for me besides pretending?) But it is as if, like that haunted automobile Christine, this white coat has a mind of its own; it can’t be hung up, it won’t be trampled underfoot, that time I immersed it in acid did nothing to it, it never even gets a spot on it, and it moves my arms and torso without me trying to, without me wanting to. Before I know it, it’s taking me back to the beakers and computers; I’m making my notes, I’m “solving” my problem sets, I’m looking with what seems, but merely seems, manic intensity down the double barrels of microscopes, knowing all of it will fizzle, knowing none of it can work.

NYT: Homo erectus was around for more than one million years; Neanderthals for 400,000. Scientists are still debating the emergence of Homo sapiens, but many think we’re only about 300,000 years into our existence.

NYT: “That’s a pug moth. That’s an elegant grass-veneer moth. And that’s a wasp.”

NYT: “Mr. Giamanco had packed lunch that day, but had to run into town to buy supplies for the job he was working on, so he called his wife and said he would come home for lunch instead. He asked her to reheat some leftover tacos. Those choices led him to a fateful moment.”

This word, this moment, can find no base. Interesting. If I were to just ‘reach down’ I could feel it — interesting thought — as if I could simply ‘reach down.’

Perhaps the difficulties involved in discussing what is certainly occurring in the areas I suggest would in some part be obviated if I were to speak of what lies beneath rather than of a so-called “base.”

Base suggests basis which in turn suggests foundation; you will pardon me if I assert a peak or top has no foundation in the traditional sense.

A peak has a backdrop. It has the perspectives that may be had upon it. It is not what merely holds it up, it is not at all that; in a sense everythingholds it up, or what is more likely, the exact opposite of that.

You see it in a moment and are forever after exalted by it; for unknown reasons, you have become a summit yourself. A peak is its own insight. A peak is not the consequence of actual processes. You can’t ascend to or descend from a peak — Yes, I’m right on that.

None of the usual thinking applies when our topic is peaks. The base of every mountain is the earth – but it is the sky that most makes its peak – so let us have no more of this “base” nonsense about “peaks” – yet there is something now occurring in that area which is not me — not me, yet lying underneath.

I’m well past the point of putting in ink
Whatever it is I’ve just happened to think
But have done so in this case nevertheless
And cross out the first phrase, then cross out the rest.

NYT: The Ukrainians are fighting a battle that benefits the entire free world. Mr. Trump is fighting only for himself.

Didn’t know this: “Because of its electricity-conducting capacity, aluminum was used as the cap of the Washington Monument, completed in 1885, the tallest building in the world at the time. The non-corroding metal cap was intended to serve as a lightning rod peak.”

I’d heard aluminum referred to as “solidified electricity” which was intriguing so I looked it up; but it apparently just means the smelting process requires a lot of electricity — the term is a fair description from a cost perspective.

“People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas”, Bellow once wrote. “We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.” Herzog.

“I never could hang on to valuables — gold, silver. With me, money is not a medium. I am money’s medium. It passes through me — taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this undignified blundering costs plenty….”

From Herzog, Saul Bellow.

granite oceans gouged depthlessly by canyons… Wolfe

Richard Nixon expert now working for the Census Bureau having just driven by. Hot sun on my skin and reciprocal longing, from my brain, for shade…. I did not feel thirsty but thought I’d worn the wrong socks. “Humidity and shins a factor in my exhaustion,” I assessed. “As one runs, one becomes a marsh around one.”

The most meaningful event of the day occurred within the first 15 minutes of having woken up — and so I thought of the day as having been “top heavy” in that sense.

Woke up with a dream of a sexual encounter with someone I tangentially knew, which made me pensive but wasn’t the meaningful thing. Then I started leaping around and spilled a fair portion of my coffee — for I had discovered a bug.

I was too surprised to take any action against it — or to take any action for it for that matter; I had not previously seen his like here before. But not long after, while I was reading, I saw another one, or the same one, and he was being really obvious about it too, so that I put an overturned glass over him like I had done the other day at the shop, where I am sadly accustomed to seeing such creatures, so as to perform a catch and release; only this one moved too quickly for me and I hurt him — I saw that I had hurt him — which I didn’t like at all — the edge of the glass, instead of containing him, had first fallen on his back.

I carried him outside and threw him by the nearby tree alive but he had been hurt, which made me pensive, though those things are pretty tough. That was the most memorable moment of today, as I sit here in the evening.s

The Lost Weekend holds up, now looking into the source of the film, novel by Charles Jackson.

Found myself thinking Jimmy Stewart, in It’s a Wonderful Life, is kind of like an exaggerated Ray Milland — a Don with no reason given for his excesses.

Something I’d forgotten about: Don always putting the wrong end of a cigarette in his mouth.

Turns out I did the right thing today: when an emergency vehicle passes you on the other side of a four lane highway, divided by double yellow lines, (and not a median) you are required to pull over in this jurisdiction. (Been a while since I’d consulted the law on this point. And I felt the cars behind me were wondering too.)

avec ma mort eût disparu non seulement le seul ouvrier mineur capable d’extraire les minerais, mais encore le gisement lui-même…“Le gisement lui-même“

Tweet: String theory is what happens when an intelligent system is starved of sensory input and starts hallucinating. Intelligence needs grounding.

For this reason, intelligence is practically never the bottleneck to solving impactful problems. The bottleneck is iterated contact with reality.

Not sure what I thought pullulation meant but not a teeming, swarming or multiplying. “The ceaseless pullulation of the sea,” Wolfe.