A tree had fallen across the forest path and, quite sensibly, rather than removing the whole tree, the Park Service has only cut out the section of it that blocks the path. Less sensibly, I am standing in the path at that very point, my legs straddling the space between the cut-off segments, as if I believed my legs to be conducting a current that flows between the cut-off segments of the dead, severed, fallen tree….
And now the dog is moving me on.
I look at my watch and see we’ve been walking for ten minutes. When I next look at my watch, it is precisely ten minutes after that, and I project the walk as a whole will be of about thirty minutes in duration, which turns out to be about right.
If Whitman was the poetry of America’s rise what was the poetry of America’s decline? (Wasn’t it just all the terrible American poetry we illiterate ones had collectively written? Not even all that terrible, just actually illiterate.)
“The U.S. is more like Rome than like Greece but in its apparent decline, it most resembles a city-state“
Stubbornesses: I want to go this way up the hill, so as to avoid having to circumnavigate the work crew, while he wants to go to up the side with the work crew, because we haven’t been that way in a bit — but today I win.
“Dear, of course that is the only thing that makes sense but I suppose I would yet have two requests,“: that’s what you say when you only want to *sound* concessive…
And now the dog is moving me on.
I’m looking at my watch but to see the time, not to see the *time elapsed*, and so have no idea how much time has elapsed since we first started walking, when, at about 9:25 AM, I come to a stop between the two tree sections. We get home, in fact, just around 10.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
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