Looked up Clark Gabel: last time I’d looked up Clark Gabel there was a story of him having killed a person while drunk driving, which I see no mention of now. From Ohio. (And Mogambo: yes, I’d seen Mogambo.) Looked up “molly-guard” — any relationship between that word and the word “molly measure”? (No: both were named after Mollies but they were different Mollies. The former was the toddler-child of an IBM researcher who kept disturbing sensitive equipment, the latter was a government employee during the Johnson Administration. Might have been coined in the same era though.) Looked at my internet history from the previous day: it had taken me longer than I’d thought to figure out roughly how many excess deaths there had been in the United States since April of 2020 and I had come across a community of single men distressed and even a little sad in the comments about the possibilities for manhood today. (He was a man, was what Gabel’s costars would say about him, according to wikipedia. “The manliest man I’ve ever known. He had balls.” Many marriages and affairs, served in the war, apparently Hitler had put a bounty on him.) Writing, I had wanted to use the word propound; it had certainly been some while since I had used it, but I had only just used the word purport and one could of course not purport to propound, which was nonsense. So I didn’t use the word propound though I had it in mind now to use it. (Looked up propound: which was “to put forward or propose” while to expound was more to explain or discuss.) Had randomly opened Gravity’s Rainbow to the song The Penis He Thought Was His Own and fell asleep in my bed to the first few pages of Ulysses — Dedalus had the Jesuit in him, according to Buck Mulligan, but “injected the wrong way.” Looked up Alaska Days with John Muir. Looked up Majuro, Banu, Knesset….
Way that this could end: it never ends. Like a Kafka parable, the first step of an infinite journey is itself infinite. As I breathe my last, the palace guard will close the shop door, then will appear the bulldozers. (“This shop had been opened only for me.” Therefore, I must really insist on more from myself, and do today what I imagine can occur only “someday.”)
Way that this could end: it never ends. Once the store ends some new version of it starts — gradually the outer reality conforming to my interior pattern — unless I can find something new in myself.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 