| 12:00 | 12:05 |
| Dog walk. Beard still wet from a recent shower. Mind set: trying to craft lively reply to a group chat. | Dog trying to lead me across a low lying area I suspect of having standing water. I pull him back gently but I’m irritated with him today. |
| Prone on couch having just read the sentence “Hemingway and Fitzgerald continued to exchange letters but they were not always friendly.” | Looking down from above into yesterday’s bag of groceries, the non-perishables which are still by the door, for something to eat, I see some microwavable rice. |
| Having just kicked off my running shoes, feet feeling a rush of coolness, I say, “no, I won’t run today, but tomorrow.” | About to turn the water for the sink on, having put a dollop of handsoap in my palm. Wrong order: you should wet your hands first. |
| Watching Rachel Cusk on youtube discussing literary form. I’m thinking: I myself never really discovered form, literary or non. | I’m thinking “Rachel Cusk is a serious person, which I know nothing about.” She’s answering a question rather obliquely about what books she wishes she’d written. |
| Just started running down the Utah hill, my excruciating toe pain “incipient” but not yet “present.” Mentally drafting a note to my highschool flame whom I may see this week for the first time in 20 years. I thought it might make our catching up more efficient if I were to give her an outline of what I’d been up to, which hasn’t been much. | Now I’m running up the hill which is the mirror image of the Utah hill. I’m reflecting on what I just saw in the dog park which wasn’t much: two women, one man, three dogs. |
| Wasting time on Twitter: I’ve just seen a video of a Republican law maker stupidly questioning Jack Smith and am searching the comments in the hopes of discovering appropriate scorn and outrage. | I’m “back at it” typing up my notebooks, trying to think of how efficiently to describe the feeling of the weight of the full dog bag suspended by two fingers at the knot. |
| Seated in living room, putting on a once white gym sock, noticing a nail in need of clipping. | Looking at the phone at what seems to be almost the precise moment that my highschool flame has texted. I’m sorry to have taken so long getting back to you, it begins. Sent at 12:03, which on my watch is 12:05. |
| I’m now actually typing the letter to the old flame that I was mentally drafting as I was descending the hill on Utah the other day. Gonna see her tomorrow… Probably wont send her this. | I’m pacing and tugging at my beard. I’m thinking how to say that through my father I inherited intellectual interests and writing concerns and through my mother social concerns…But I’m definitely not gonna send this. |
| Putting on a fresh shirt, the one I thrifted with my niece that day, in anticipation of the old flame’s visit. It is over my arms now and soon to be over my head. | My hand is in the ankle portion of a sock; I’m folding laundry in case we spend our visit here. I wonder what she has in mind? |
| I just happened to have noticed the time (11:58) and am waiting for 12:00 to come around, then I grow impatient and decide that THAT will be my entry for the day. And yet, by the time 12:00 in fact rolls around, I have found the notebook in which I’ve been keeping this project, but have yet to find the page. | I’m in between the cat on the cat tree, whose neck I’ve been scratching, and the sofa, where I’ve decided I’ll kill the thirty minutes before my dental appointment with a book, when I abruptly change directions: I’ll brush my teeth again. |
| Beneath a blue blanket on a rainy day. I’ve just read about Max Perkins and Tom Wolfe having a drink at the Waldorf, which was not their usual spot. I have it in the back of my mind that I want to eat something and check the internet. | I’m reading an article about Trump doxxing Tom Cotton because he’s upset about Daylight Savings Time, as dumb as that sounds, while trying to fish a bit of cheese off a molar with my tongue. This is trickier than it may seem because I’ve got trismus, according to the dentist, a kind of minor form of lockjaw. |
| I’ve reached the 45th minute of a so far painless run and am turning around so as not to push my luck, though it’s a beautiful October day. Mindset: I’m thinking a certain idea I have for a story might work if I can drastically reduce my ambitions for it. | Homeward bound. Just passing Sparrow Pond, beside which one woman is explaining to another something about water fowl. Mindset: I’m still feeling sad and wistful after the high school flame’s brief visit (I wish she had written me goodbye) – for the time that had passed and the pains we’d endured and the people who were gone. “You were a good first boyfriend,” she’d told me. “We had our time.” |
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