Something you’d seen often before — a trash can near the parked cars of the volunteer firefighters — was that for the deposition of medical waste? (You’re thinking the medical waste should be deposed? “For disposing of medical waste,” you perhaps mean). And you’ve noticed a founding stone you’d never seen before — “1983.” Yes: Going to the doctor not to avoid getting sick but so as to avoid going to the doctor after getting sick, which would demonstrate you were a fool, which would be worse than getting mortally sick? (Shouldn’t you go to the doctor just to be well?) “When the Challenger happened, I was age ten, which was around 1983…. Knowing another language might so radically alter your English Language brain chemistry as to meaningfully reshuffle the sequence of years.” The fool: now that nothing can be done — what can be done?
Shadows of plants climbing over the “horizon” of the sidewalk into the “sky” of the road. Then I identify a separate branch as “marcessant.” … I am concerned to see the Bobcat turn so abruptly toward the worker. (The worker’s helping lift heavy manhole covers into the extended shovel portion of the Bobcat.) I pass Brittany in the shade of her front yard — studying for the pharmacology exam. I experience a moment’s disorientation by being engaged in small talk by a pretty girl, but am dismissed before long. All moods pass eventually, I think, and so will the one I’m in now — it will — it does — which is among the positive health benefits of walks. On Cleveland — I will forget how big and wonderful that one tree is. On Cleveland: someone has neglected to pick up after their dog. A disturbance down Edgewood has caused me to change course and, now on 13th, I’m looking at my watch: precisely twenty minutes ago I was climbing the hill checking my watch. I was seeing, at that time, I was about ten minutes earlier at that point than I had been the previous day, which was the normal time I would be at that point. (I was early today.)
Red empty open shoebox leaned against recycling barrel, bright unblemished cardboard with a design. Dusty black electrical tape at hill bottom beside an orange Orange Gatorade twist-off cap. Now passing two oil spots in a hazy swirled track. Bumper sticker — “i love mountains.” Sign: “VAX HERE.” “Each day as it comes,” you tell yourself as the suspended wheel of the trailer of a cement truck passes closely. Worker striking soft earth hard with a tool: that “thunk” or “thud” of the beaten earth. The “chink” as it hits a small stone. Engine of that truck turning over provides a “bottom,” or baseline, to the “high pitched electric guitar chirring” of the locusts, I note.
I arbitrarily reach out and touch the large metal box by the stoplight for the second fire station as I pass it, and find it is of less solid construction than I’d supposed, like a filing cabinet. Little blue flowers with small purple ones along a couple of these lawns; daffodils, about six daffodils, in the woodsy portion of the 28th street hill with the retaining wall of rotting rail road ties. Dog seems merely to paddle with his paws, the movement is so relatively insignificant, while the whole body of the mistress seems an efficiently gliding canoe behind him.
Question: if you pretend to be something you’re not (though I mean by that something less than what we would today call being a hypocrite) does that mean you’re as far as you can possibly be from being that thing, pulling in the wrong direction, or does it mean you’re at an early stage of morphing into that thing, heading in the right direction? (I suppose the question depends at least somewhat on — who you actually are.)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
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