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Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,/ Old iron, old bones, old rags, (Yeats)

National chain across street had been closed for a bit because one of their workers had had a case, but now their hours were shorter too, did attendant know why? (Was said they were having trouble filling shifts.) Had attendant noticed uptick in business since the National Chain had changed hours? (No.) Wasn’t this place supposed to have closed years ago, been turned into a mixed-use something or other, like all these others going up? (Yes.)

Attendant setting out pastries downstairs heard water rushing from the upstairs bathroom though no one could be in there and guessed the mechanism that sensed the tank’s water level wasn’t deploying properly.

Attendant expressed pleasure that air temperature suited customer at present but admitted that, in fact, it could be rather variable and beyond even the management’s control.

Eastern African customer spoke about income equality in his country — no, in his country everybody is down, he said. There are the people in power there, who are in a different category than everybody else, but a rich person has something like a 100,000 dollars. Nothing like in the United States.

Glistening sunlit points on the river observed from a picnic bench. Essay had been read about the poet Wordsworth. Having run just over five miles, the midway point, I walked past a row of blue plastic portable toilets set up for the July 4th celebration, then sat at this weathered picnic table bench. Sun, grass, water…. Saw underbellies of three airliners overhead. Two nearby teenage girls watching over three very young children, taking pictures of each other modeling in front of the departing planes.

I seemed to know at the time, resting at the picnic bench, that this, in my limited understanding of things, was to be the most important moment of the day (which I seem now to prove to myself by writing of it) though it was not a personally very eventful day, like most. (The sense of rest, the sense of “taking it in”, was perhaps what had made this moment seem so important.)

Beside the two teenage photographing gals watching capably over the three young children, there was a young man by himself at a picnic bench down the way, engaged in his rigorous personal exercise regimen. The cranes across the river, projecting salient over the squat marble of the town, reminded me of the birds in a Tintoretto painting I’d seen exhibited a few days before at the West Wing, as they were all pointed the same way because of the wind — “just like the birds in the painting,” I’d been thinking.

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Satanic Verses going to Goodwill (same location I got it from — like a library book), Herodotus going to Goodwill (hard to imagine I’ll read Herodotus again), hardbound modern library edition of Plutarch is the same size and color as the hard cover modern library edition of Moby Dick, so those two will go together somewhere, though they are hard to see against the shelves’ unpainted wood. Perhaps in the wood shelf painted white they’ll be seen together. Canadian History For Dummies can go. A Derrida Reader can go. Scores to Beehtoven’s 8th and 9th can go but I am keeping Don Giovanni: an impressive wide soft blue object I’m unlikely to reopen. John Updike’s poems, Freud can go. A Strange Commonplace, which I love and made a study of, and is slim, I shall keep in the white painted bookshelf. Another copy of Herodotus: this one I’ll keep. But I can’t possibly make serious headway returning my books to the shelves until I find the boxes with my Loebs, whose green-ness, whose “greenery”, is intended to “tie the room together.” Found two red ones, but I’ve given up on Latin, but one of them is Horace, of whom I made a “study.” They will look good somewhere, two and red: “Twoness and redness.” Perhaps in between the hardbound modern library editions, and their “twoness and brownness.”

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Summs didn’t know how he had initially come across this name, maybe it had been something he had overheard, but for years the mere pronunciation of its syllables would give him an extraordinary sense of self-possession.

He would be feeling “diffuse” and unconcentrated. His spirit would seem “out there” among the many things he perceived, even unto the horizon, rather than “in here” within himself, which was the source and lord of his capacity to perceive. But then he would pronounce the syllables of this name Hans Castorp in a whisper, and it was as if his spirit, from every corner of the globe, returned quickly back into him. He would feel almost shaken by the reanimation. He was himself again, within himself — self-possessed.

When he discovered by chance one day where the name came from — it was the principal character of a novel — he was disappointed and the word lost something of its power for a time. It was not so much that it came from a work of fiction that had disappointed him, although he had an unfavorable attitude toward fiction, but that it came from anywhere in nature and was not the name of a spirit from another heaven or dimension.

However, the name’s power was no illusion, and still today he would pronounce it, and his seeking inquiring spirit, which had spanned the world and beyond, would hear his call and come roaring back.

“four-legged effect”
body of her child
under her heavy coat creates

You must forgive me if my constitution is so implacably hale and so vitally active as to sometimes prevent me from writing in a quite legible or intelligible manner, though truth to tell, I really consider the first objective of writing to be “fingercise” more than any such weakly traditional objectives as “communicating clearly” or “documenting accurately.”

Fingercise definition: fingercise is the exercising of the fingers, using a Health Bar, in such manner as will promote their continued health, strength, breadth and all around growth, with the aim of one day having Superhands — hands that could as easily crush books in their grip as write them.(A “Health Bar” is known by Weak Men as a pen.)

It’s always been a source of amazement to me that writers, who must have the most powerful hands of all the world, the most powerful grips ever witnessed in history –- certainly the most powerful in the history of this world — appear to spend so much of their time creating books and such little time crushing them, in displays of real power, – which is a very strange application of their finger strength! Come on you authors, we’re tired of your so-called thoughts — why not show us what you’ve really got? Why not show, with your health bar, your true power?

Not just this, but the constant scraping of my lower hand against the table and paper has given this area an extraordinary super toughness, comparable to the leathery hide of the wildebeast. And If I should ever be caught in a theater fire, such flame retardant toughness has the bottom palmar parts of my hands attained to, I should simply lead the crowd out behind my outstretched arm. Now how’s does that compare, you authors, to your punily intelligible “thoughts”!

Drivers: white, middle-aged, driving one-handed, putting chip or fry-sized wafer in his mouth from the right. White, twenties, baseball cap, driving one hand, male, scratching left cheek with first two fingers of left hand. White guy reaching over right shoulder for seat belt — must have only just gotten on road. White sun-glassed Gal making turn out of parking lot, hands at 10 and 2. Middle Eastern middle-aged “mini-vanned” man: you couldn’t see where his hands were positioned, but by the way his chin was set against his throat, you felt they must be at seven and five. Blond woman, sunglasses, leaning forward and looking up as if to check something far behind her in the rear-view. Repair man in a cap: fully turning head left, then right, then quickly again left, before driving the van to the right.