.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

And it doesn’t pertain at all to Thought (Thought is like math) or to Perception (which is like a florid verbal description of the sort you could never write yourself, the author is so talented)

(Thought is like a law court, Thought is like the judge; the judge, however, likes to go into the chemistry lab quite a bit and he is never quite the same when he comes back out.)

What else: women with dogs, dogs with dogs, dogs with boys, the man who is a public nuisance, the young running woman who mildly alarms you, the chair that is like a chiropractor’s table (you never know when, or where, it might give)…

You have no idea, as you’re looking with mild interest at the unexpected road closure, that you are going to make the judgment later today that it has actually, though not catastrophically, been a fairly bad day — the fault of one’s choices, naturally enough, not the fault of the day.

Noticing that while a lot of people are meticulous about using the plural verb with “data” they are less meticulous, and even reluctant, to use the plural pronoun.

Perhaps this is an accepted usage I don’t know about but I heard Chairman Powell doing it a lot during his remarks last week. The data always were, the data was always it.

Wondering if Wallace Steven’s First Idea (from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction) might better be seen through the lens of scientific revolution than of poetic discovery.

The first idea is the reality which Newton/ Galileo saw “without the varnish” of Aristotelian ideas. It is the reality, the phenomena, that Einstein saw without the varnish of Newtonian ideas. Einstein is a poet looking past Newtonian assumptions to arrive at a new idea of the elemental nature of the universe, the “first idea.” Maybe?

Interesting phrase “hunger for courage” — Hanania.

I’d passed the woman holding what I’d identified as French baguette inside the grocery store, now she has passed me on the street outside with her baguette. I thought of the word “baguette” then began mentally to defend my use of the word banquette in a text message earlier in the day (not to suggest that anyone had complained of my use of this word): banquette was a bad word to use in that it wasn’t a word everyone knew, I agreed, but a good one in that it meant something more precise than bench. (The kitchen bench, I might have called it.)

Staring from behind at the earing of the grocery store clerk as she makes an adjustment at my self-checkout kiosk. She has no idea I’m doing it and she wouldn’t care if she did.

Someone having thrust a stick, a short twig, through a mounting hole of a street sign post. When you see such arbitrariness, you assume a child, but it may not have been.

Question: was your downward mobility related positively, negatively, or not all, to your society’s decline?

Related question: Was your upward mobility, were it eventually to transpire, actually independent of your society’s decline?

Related: What is that remark of Confucius again? “When government is Just, good men grow wealthy?” (Probably imperfectly remembered bad translation.)

Question: Why were you glad the woman with the rollator had turned aside before it had become necessary to pass her? (Always awkward passing people. Maybe next they would pass you — and you would pass them again — then you had to stop to check your watch and got passed again — on and on.) Does anyone stop to check their watch today? (no.)

Experiencing no time at all between the removal of the bottle’s plastic cap and the consumption of the plastic bottle’s contents (If we could only see and slow time enough to see what we’re doing, it is thought, then our Will Power would excitingly appear.)

How did you demonstrate your handiness today? (Greased a lock.) How is it you can make a friend laugh but not an audience? (There is probably a good answer to that question, if you cared enough to seek it out. It probably has to do, though, with “assumed knowledge” in some way.)

Did you BEND anything today that wasn’t a part of your anatomical person? (What kind of idiotic question is that? Did I BEND anything today? If I had, if I hadn’t…. but yes, of course I did.)