The shoulder of the jogger. I had been looking to see if the jogger ahead of me was the same jogger I’d passed previously. This previous jogger had worn a sleeveless shirt and had a tatoo of a kind I could not recall on her shoulder, while this current jogger had a shirt I’d call sky blue in coloration, and I was looking at the shoulder of it, which had a sleeve, and no tattoo could be seen there.
That corner of her shirt, –and I don’t believe I’m joking when I say this — although I may be joking– occurred to me as something important. Looking at the figure of a woman is something that will in some engender sexual excitement; and sexual excitement derived from things that don’t seem sexual we call a fetish; but what I saw on this shoulder was a kind of distillation of ordinariness, something so uninteresting, it seemed what all life was made of, an elementary particle of boredom. Not sexual, not a fetish, not of interest, but a fabric of everything that was sort of the opposite of a fetish, leaving one lifeless and mesmerized by ordinariness. It was something even more fundamental than an atom, this random part of a t-shirt.
This jogger and I actually ran on opposite banks of the stream for a while after that. The trail on her side being far more meandering, I was surprised to see she’d caught up with me at George Mason, and I lost heart a bit when I lost track of her on Walter Reed.
Tale of The Dried Red Sauce
Now I have a headache; earlier I’d gone to the post office. I’d become worried while going to the post office because I’d discovered a bit of dried red sauce on my fleece and thought of the postal clerk I was sure to see there as being kind of a military type and stickler about such things, who would not be amused. Then it got worse because as I tried to contend with red sauce, scratching it off with a finger, I discovered tooth paste remnants too, not only on the fleece, but on the shorts. And yet, in the event, the postal clerk seemed alright with me this time: I wasn’t some disorderly civilian who had toothpaste all over him and didn’t give a damn, but a customer of the store who, in spite of his significant failings, needed to be treated in a professional manner. I sent off a post card to my niece and to a college friend and bought a package of post card stamps and forever stamps and left.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 