Woke with the idea the word tambourine was related to the French word Jambe, which it wasn’t, according to my sources, when I looked it up… When I really thought of a leg I was thinking of the Greek word of it encountered in The Symposium. (One doesn’t encounter the Greek word for anatomical parts in Greek class in the same way one will encounter the French words for anatomical parts in a French class, it occurred to me.) Arm, I knew to be bras in French. Skelos, I think it was…. To think my right leg was Skelos and my right leg (my left leg) was jambe. Skelos and Jambe — a crime fighting duo or comedy team. Skellos and Jambe — One thing was sure: that neither of my legs was a “leg.” (The word “Leg” itself is something proto-germanic. Apparently the Greeks called the side of a triangle a skelos, a “leg.”  To think of the imaginary line between my feet as the third leg in this usually isosceles triangle. Isosceles: “same legs.”)

Passage of The Symposium in which Aristophanes is describing original human beings, which had four legs… To think (I almost thought of and visualized it for a second) of knowledge as a kind of space, like outer space, in which knowledge-things like physics equations orbited around knowledge-things like Latin verb conjugations, or how to cook pasta, a galactic area of knowledge with physical values and forces… Can’t recall the other language in which I saw a word for leg today. (But who is the straight man in this hilarious comedy team? Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both, but always an hilarious pair.) Membrium inferium is lower leg in Latin, which perhaps I’d been thinking of.

Question: let me take the customer back to the days when he was trying to maximize the traffic to his blog, using key words and the like. How much traffic had he generated from that and how much income did it bring in? (Maybe 200 hits/ day with income of 5 dollars/ month, “around that.” Better than his Bitcoin mining.)

Customer irate: someone had actually called the county because they couldn’t push their huge luxury double-wide baby strollers past her honeysuckles, which grow onto the sidewalk a bit. People love my honeysuckles!

Customer was David’s friend Stephany. David had let a certain person smoke in his car, but Stephany would not have let that person, nor any person, smoke in her car. Stephany was surprised at David.

Customer wore faded St. Jude hospital t-shirt. (Advertisements for St. Jude hospital would appear when  attendant watched Youtube.) Customer interested in selling his “one of a kind” Victor Stanley park bench ends. Three gals: everything bagel with cream cheese and iced caramel latte with almond milk; cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese and an iced caramel latte with almond; and a medium americano and sesame bagel with butter. On positive side, customer had ridden a bicycle 5 times this week; on negative side, kid in the apartment upstairs was taking running leaps and landing hard on the ceiling. Customer ordered small iced coffee with soy. Customer didn’t know story of Job.

Here, Daniel, you try too — it’s only water — but what is a waterbrain? — it’s the most powerful liquor in the world, drink up philosopher, it will turn us into an unstoppable trio — Dad, can I fill up another pitcher? — You bet, son! — Why do I feel so powerful all of a sudden, like nothing can stop me, like nothing can get in my way? — It’s because water! the most amazing, most supercharged element in creation! it is what we need, Daniel, and not one jot more than that or other than that — here let me have another glass — I’ll pour — heh! let someone else have a turn! —

And when their thirst had been slaked, and more than slaked, the three sat together on the couch, united in what they called Water Wisdom — “three awkward trembling parade balloons,” as she had it — ” a weird and watery night.”

Noticing, before stepping out, through the entryway’s sidelights, there was a squirrel with what looked like a tennis ball in its mouth. (Thinking human civilization was a gate or sieve or screen door, through which other species, to continue to evolve, must pass — squirrels and Robins at the forefront or having already passed through the sieve.) Was evolutionary theory essentially liberal or conservative. Scavengers becoming predators, growing to huge sizes. Squirrels tails’ like those of ankylosaurs. Robins becoming sharks, Sparrows becoming towering trees, a thousand years old, while roaches, having grown microscopically small and gelatinous, only inhabit beaches and quasi marine areas.) Punctuation as a kind of geological phenomenon. how did geology and palimpsestry appertainOpening door cautiously in the event this was a “crazy” (ie =crazy)  squirrel. There he was on the front door mat, with what might have been a tennis ball in his mouth, about that size, caught in the act, exposed, maybe from the garbage or maybe from a nearby tree. He leaves the fruit on the mat darting off, a lion in 50,000,000 years, though why should I care, why should I have an idea of 50,000,000 years (oversized baguette in my mouth) science and democracy and capitalism have produced ideas such as “50,000,000 years” — ideas that may themselves be dead in 500 —  when a couple human generations seem like the vague stage curtains around my life.  (Democracy:  the public seems to operate with a damaged brain.)

(Immediate abdication: “A videogame would say it better.” The generic image of a door mat on a brick stoop. The generic image of a squirrel with its oversized greenish ballish fruit darting off. The generic step down to a generic sidewalk which intersects another sidewalk of the same sort…. In a video game, particularly one from the 80’s, the generic quality of all the things that surround you would be better represented than in any words of yours. For it doesn’t occur to you that there is any this to this place yet your appearance seems to insist on a this, on specificity in the place where you are. … Which Joyce solved through a mastery of the technical vocabulary of modern urban settings and familiarity with Dublin.)

At the corner of that intersection of sidewalk on the right side, a few stray pieces of garbage — where they pick the garbage up from in the mornings, and — the animals often getting to it before the garbage men do — you will often find generic orange rinds and generic nut shells or bottle caps or torn tissues around there. Today there is an odd remnant, less generic: what looks to be the colorful plastic remnants of a child’s toy, odd because there are no children in the building, that I know about. Start of a detective novel maybe. Moving on…

Customer agreed that Republicans were responsible for the Iraq War, which was a tragedy; that Republicans didn’t believe in climate change, which was obtuse; that Republicans had created a dangerous situation in the Supreme Court; that Republicans had elected as their most recent presidential nominee a “demagogue and complete ignoramous”; that Republicans had only conspiracy theories and slogans where they should have arguments and policy views; that Republicans had nearly repealed the Obamacare which the customer said she herself had greatly benefited from, and which she did give credit to the Democrats for; that Republicanism essentially stood for whacky irresponsible governance — THE EMAILS, THE SERVERS, THE PEDOPHILE RING!!! … She agreed with these ideas yet thought the problem was “money” and “both parties” and wished Governor Hogan (R) would run.

The presents of senescence beneath the tree of the elderly

I’m greyed and afraid of this parade of the staid and decayed in which I’ve been waylaid.

Hospital trouble, a memory in rubble, parents in need of a body double

(And it’s all as inaudible as it’s inlaudable.)

And once they ‘ve risen into the sun your own taxi down the tarmac’s begun

In this anti-airplane of a walker and cane with the captain announcing you’re lame and insane

(Please fasten your transfer and gait belt.)

Guess all you can do is laugh at the loss, confusion and pain as we make our way back to the place where we came.

Ahead is an interesting word. Bed load is a word I have learned. I stop looking at my feet, look over to the stream, at its bed load and feel satisfied to know a word that stands for, or indicates, the rocks, pebbles and sand that comprise its bottom. HEH JERRY HAVE A LOOK AT THIS BED LOAD! ALRIGHT TOM I’M COMING BUT IT BETTER BE GOOD. If vocabulary could be considered geologically, I suppose bed load would be a kind of clastic sedimentary rock, the ancient matter that comprised bed, the ancient matter that comprised load, here made to congeal in one mass by intense volcabulaic processes.

There had been a cat on the path, remember when that happened years ago? You had stopped and held the cat down and called someone over to use their phone to call the number on its collar and they had reached the owner and the owner had said it was alright because the cat was an outdoor cat.

Q: on the geologists twitter page, when she asked her community what were the most important attributes of a geologist, what answer was the most overwhelmingly given? (The capacity to think in terms of very long periods of time.) Follow up: what was another interesting attribute that was stated? (Ability to work with incomplete data sets.) To be able to look at a rock and say: here was where a mountain stream met a river comprised of glacial melt, which then dried up as the region became a desert, would be a very fine skill to have, it seemed to me.

This simple bare concrete is the rock that represents the present, and tells us nothing. If an archeologist a million years from now would be able to get into my mind, the excitement would be intense in the Planet Control Center. We’ve done it! We’ve entered the mind of our most ancient of ancient ancestors! Then they would turn on the view screen and find nothing, this bare concrete. They would ask themselves why did they bother: they have worked so hard to discover what ancient life is like and they have found it only to contain the inadequate blankness of their own present. Bare concrete, a stretch of bare squares, that have somehow amounted to history.

Why was it that the things you thought of to write while you were walking never materialized into good written things when you got back from your walk? (Good question — now actually try to answer that.) When you’re writing you’re in the midst of an idea: it is occurring even as you’re writing it. When you’re writing about a great idea you had on your walk, you are writing about something that’s already occurred. That’s reportage, which is something quite different. (Henry Miller somewhere addresses this experience.).

I often had what I thought were good ideas while I slept or half-slept and these, too, I could never get down when I sat down to write. There were times, when you slept, having fallen asleep to some good book, when the thing you dreamed of writing was infused with that thing you had read, was in every way as good as that good thing you had read but now it was your own, a dream indeed, then you had woken and sat down to write it, and it all been a dream. Yes, of course you knew that you’d been sleeping but was that beautiful vision you’d had really a complete illusion? (It was.)

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The “philosophy of a million dollars” … Essentially — there is no freedom until there is financial freedom, and since to be financially free — (though the absolute value will vary from place to place and time to time) – you need about a million dollars, this is all most people need to know of moral philosophy: make a million dollars or so — at which point you’re in a position to really make free decisions about morality.

(Of course, if you have gotten your million dollars through illegal or immoral means you may find that, now that you are free to make truly moral decisions, you are obligated to give it back, which should be avoided.)

It seems like what necessitates something like the philosophy of a million dollars is if you assume the morality of work for compensation. If you believe it’s immoral to have a living without working for it that seems to put many of our holiest and most revered moral figures in a bit of a spot; while wage earners/ people without a million dollars, can’t even allow themselves to think certain things about what morality really demands/ are very constricted as to what they can do morally. (A soldier can’t entertain that killing is immoral, a merchant can’t entertain that profit is immoral, etc.)

However, it also suggests something ennobling about wage earning: that workers are not working for luxurious tropical vacations or an escape from work and early retirement; they’re working for the opportunity and hope of one day making truly moral decisions, rather than under the constrain of necessity.

Obviously, in this scheme, people born into financial freedom have a better opportunity of understanding freedom’s finer points than those born into poverty – is it really so? – (Maybe the ethic should be rephrased: the ethic of earning and saving a million dollars, not merely having it — but what does that essentially change?)

This is a stupid idea.  We believe children capable of moral choices yet they don’t participate in economic freedom. And while a Master Class does problably not concern itself with the moral choices among its slaves, those slaves, among themselves, have and believe in a moral sense.

Stoic objection: that the amount of money one actually needs to be financially free is zero. Maybe cannot be greater than zero. Communist objection: the philosophy of a million dollars is the typical laughable American fantasy. No one can be financially free until everyone is financially free.

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