.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

A specific moment like syzygy where, as I pass the fence post, the lamp posts of the distant basketball court will align with each other. Name for where the tire meets the wheel (wheel rim?) which is bright red on that motorbike. Cross hatches in the iron of the manhole cover; scattered waves of grass cuttings, dried out by days of sun.

Bright lit concrete path cut in half by dark bush shadow cheese, onion, soda, beer, apples, and tortilla Tennis court broom aslant tennis court fence. (Fees fresh, fees fresh) Now Speeding up to outpace sudden arc of water cast by lawn sprinkler, getting one drop above, and one drop below, the sock line. (Symbolism.)

Argument: “I try to live well but this generates Facts and it’s only when I live as it were badly that I find an animating spirit to make a connecting sense of these Facts.” Counterargument: no you do not ‘try.’  Counterargument: for a person with as little to lose as yourself you sure do make some conservative choices, why? Argument: Finnegans Wake has it right and we actually cannot “say anything.” (Finnegans Wake makes no such claim that you know about.) Argument — Blake: Reason is goodness and provides laws and bounds, Evil is energy and a creative force.

Two sparrows sitting on the parking sign edge; no, it is one sparrow and one similarly-sized similarly-colored hob at the top of the sign pole. Sparrow flies off, while hob, remaining, is looked at.

Experiencing a strange bending of reality or dimension, was my first indication that a lens of my glasses had popped out. Never heard anything so it must have landed in the grass.

Surprised at the automatic slackening of my pace as I start my ascent of the hill…. Perhaps the hill automatically shortens one’s gait so that, to continue at the same speed, one needs actually to move quicker or lengthen one’s stride as you start up. Still, I’m surprised to find my pace has slowed as I begin to climb without me having intended to go any slower, just as if I were an object that had been rolled up the hill rather than a lifeform that would be naturally inclined to retain its rate of speed in the face of an obstruent. A natural inclination to maintain the same number of steps per minute, not meters per minute, perhaps.

The car stereo loud and heard well away from the moving car but playing something simple: repeating three notes of a major triad slowly in descending order on an acoustic guitar.

When the car has passed out of hearing distance, I find myself humming the same three notes in the same descending order but soon discover that, while I can do that capably enough, easily in fact, I can’t hum those same three notes in reverse order. … I can’t even hum the first note of the ascending triad, even though it’s the same as the last in the descending triad, which I have just hummed…. I give up after a few attempts.

The world isn’t forever, customer said.

Dentist customer, speaking of the lack of ethics he’d confronted in his profession: the mouth is such an intimate thing, the profession is so stressful, why wouldn’t you do anything else to make money, if money was what you wanted?

(a) Facile stupid humor in place of “baring your heart” (b) but Heart can’t be borne or bared or one has not a heart (c) Dementia patients not hearing impaired (the automobile is the “dementia patient”) (d) “when the patient is dry” etc (6) when the pavement is dry, it is the entire car’s passage through the air that you primarily hear; when the pavement is wet, it is its tires on the water you primarily hear.

Child chasing child around jungle gym. They must both have been feeling their feet upon wood chips. Then the chased one runs up the slide: long corduroy pantlegs on the slide’s surface up. Idea that the child first feels the thrill of getting away, then the disappointment of no longer being chased. One has gotten away — from life.

Having a sense of purpose. A customer had asked if I would be his POA and executor of his estate. Two or three years later he had a debilitating stroke; two or three months after that he died. In those couple months I felt an extraordinary sense of purpose and direction and was busier than I had ever been. Visiting the hospital, calling the financial adviser, calling the insurance, mailing and copying documents, meeting at the bank, picking up records, family, emergency rooms, consulting with doctors, what could be done about the aphasia, what could be done about the nausea, “you’re the only one who can understand what I’m saying,” he would say, “no: it’s getting better,” I would say. One of the funny stories that came out of it was that, waiting for him in the second of the assisted living facilities we’d placed him in, I’d stretched out on the bed, waiting for him to return from his breakfast — tired, and I would need to be at work soon — when a nurse came in and told me it was time for my insulin shot.

Read Alyosha The Pot (Tolstoy), about the short life of a simple worker, and felt I had some of that same spirit in myself but muddled and impure. Looked up Alyosha The Pot, having wondered if Dostoyevsky had used this as the basis for his own Alyosha, but if anything it was the other way, this story having been written late and published posthumously, wikipedia said. Invoking the name of ‘holy fool’ in its description of the character (which recalled Nietzsche’s attacks on the ‘holy fool’, which was part of his feud with Wagner) the article indicates he was likely based on a mentally impaired servant of the Tolstoys. (“We all have Alyosha and Fyodor and Ivan in us — one degree or another,” is thought: “duty, intellect, appetite.” And, I suppose, our Smerdyakovs, I might have added.)

“One degree or other”: If there had been more physical work and less television in my youth… is thought. Then I was thinking in an academic vein about footnotes — academic, but it may importantly pertain to the structure of this work. Envision each page here as a footnote but you don’t know what it is a footnote to, that information having been lost — the central text has been lost, the central text may not exist, the central text may not be existible or may be “me” and not a literal text — which would be dissatisfying or maybe not as it’s all the same water or “case” being sloshed to different sides of the filthy yellow mop bucket […] (There is an Over Voice to my Interior Alyosha, which at once makes me more authoritative, and worse — which is Ivan. One can neither go forward into independence nor backward into obedience. One had never really been a child: there had been this adult despondency, depression, all the way through, since adolescence, an oppressive intimation of sex — Mitya) Next envision the footnotes as opened windows in your browser, each page a window. This perhaps too gimmicky to pursue, what am I thinking? Sort of narrative that can only be read on an electronic device perhaps, as it is impossible to read in sequence, the thing being not meant sequentially. Each time you appear at the site it randomly presents a new window — the book is opened at random. For example:

THE KARATE KID

[The Karate Kid is an interesting movie. He cannot see the girl’s desire for him because in her too he sees the strong monster who desires the girl. The girl’s strong desire for the Kid cannot overcome the Kid’s strong fear of the monster who defends her.]  [In real life, there isn’t any monster and there isn’t any girl, there is just the indelible imprint of those two entities grafted and irremovable from ourselves, fear and desire, the three of us metamorphosed into rocks unrecognizable as human, a geochemist required to unbake and distinguish the original elements of this curiously pied hunk of stone and crystal, which from your point of view is experienced as an omnipresent gas, a vague feeling of never quite being yourself, of being free to move but trapped, always winding up at the same place in the maze, though once in a while there do seem these moments of escape: neither gas nor stone nor monster nor girl but ones own substance and self and free. Free to fight monsters, free to love girls.] But was fear and desire the problem or was that the bad movie version of the problem? It was this fossilized fear and desire that had somehow become one with oneself…

Perhaps this spectation the computer offers is the reward and consolation for those who have fled the monster… One has seen and desired the girl. One has found the girl is the possession of the monster. One knows one cannot defeat the monster, one knows one cannot get around the monster, and because the monster is so much stronger and faster and more cunning than you, it occurs to you he’s simply better than you and it’s so frustrating you’ve made her or him into the figure of a monster, some unimaginable thing (what is so monstrous really to you is the situation which, desiring what they have, you can’t compete.) “Whatever — doesn’t matter.” You think “I’ll simply leave this girl and this monster and find another girl without a monster” but you also come across the same monster with any given girl. Maybe they are not yet there, with this particular girl, but they will be there, and his or her potential presence is as terrible as the actual presence. So one cannot only not reach that girl, one can reach no girl. So one thinks well is there something more important than girls and power and sensual pleasure and all those obviously secular things, is there god and community and charity and satisfaction in just being above ground, and so can’t I just go away and not have to do with monsters and girls, but all that too lies beyond the monsters, for by ‘girl’ we’ve meant to indicate just those things, the symbol of any kind of desired thing, any kind of realized success, and by monster we’ve meant something that makes such a success impossible, and so in fleeing the monster and the girl and in fleeing all monsters and girls one discovers the same: one can live for a time, one can eat and drink and carry on and be bad and go to jail or be good and win the praise of the mayor himself but ultimately you only demonstrate to yourself — and this is what the story of Jonah is to me about, and why it abides with me as a kind of favorite — there are somethings from which one cannot runaway. The girl will be there, unwon, the monster will be there, unbeaten, so long as one fails to be a hero, and that is the creeping displeasure of your life.

Driver: free arm on armrest, upraised, palm outward, fingers in claw.

As one writes in small notebooks while standing the notes inevitably assume a triangle shape, with the last line, the apex, one word. In this case — “word.” (In the former case “claw.”)

Leaf shadows without connecting branch or twig shadows and the shape of spear points: likeness to fossils and light like the stone.

Customer regretted throwing away so much plastic — a salad container, a bag containing it, the plastic silverware in it.

It was checked whether the ice cream contained egg.