Idea: what if all of history had been written by the same person.

(Idea: in the future, technology will be that same person, that one voice.)

That we have already been heading in that direction: the technological in us being given more and more expression or “voice.”

Idea that there can be something old-feeling and old-fashioned about ancient history that goes beyond the subject matter, as if only old people wrote ancient history (which is not a criticism but characterization of “voice.”)

Idea that this is the way Cheever sometimes seems to write a short story: he has a character in view, he writes two or three adventures or situations with that character, then at a certain point he asks himself what the common thread of these situations has been, and that’s his conclusion, that’s the short story.

Idea of reimagining of practice of Kintsugi as “showing one’s code”? (All our thoughts on blogs show nothing of the code that’s behind their ordering and transmission. These lines of code are like the cracks in the pottery that Kintsugi may beautifully highlight.)

LGTBQ gal from Alexandria moving to Silversrping to live with her partner, also cheaper and nearer work, she reports. Finally had gotten her bike rack on her bike; it had taken a long time. Customer had been to Wise Guys pizza. Overall, really enjoyed the experience. Would say the pizza was fair: it was a thin crust. He had best liked the atmosphere, which evoked Manhattan, the outstanding Frank Sinatra music. But he had had a very fine day sitting there overall watching the people coming and enjoying themselves. Really quite interesting. Customer: only liked movies with explosions. Working Girl from pretty far back.

Customer was police woman and her police woman partner. Had a call in the area and thought to stop in. (I marveled at the quantity of objects and tools on their belts and elsewhere on their uniform.)

Customer thought that “arrested development cases” — grown but not adult -– had failed to accept their mortality, had not accepted death, but I proposed that it was their birth they had not accepted and that acknowledgment of mortality could potentially follow quickly after that.

This idea wondered about, which was more to be feared — that we could “die” at any moment, at any moment finding ourselves in the water-filling trap, or that we will live a hideously long time, sitting there able to do nothing but swallow?

Attendant’s weird idea for a movie: what if there were what were once called negro spirituals about Plato and Plato’s forms?

Customer pronounced Maryland Muralund. First mother’s day without his mother.

The “wild” customer who did handyman work for the old lady living alone. Making me see that person as like the one my grandmother had relied on, whom she would keep some beers in the fridge for, and lunch things. Relied on him.

Confidentially, said customer, why had customer been banned? (Abusive to boss.)

When I forgot the couple’s croissant I asked myself why that happened, and I told myself (barring writing things down or what have you) the rule should be that you always get the quickest things (a cookie, a bottled drink) done first because as you make the items that take more time (an espresso drink, a sandwich) you become more likely to forget the other things. Very thing happened later with the Alabama-Tennessee couple who’d ordered the lemonades with their sandwiches. I was like “bye” when I handed them their sandwiches and they were like “no, the lemonades.”

We are encompassed by those energy cubes that in Dune are meant to defend people from attack, cubes which make the world seem against us but are comprised of our own desire to live. — And the gal I saw outside by the bus stop, for whatever reason, seemed to exist outside of that, — “natural”, is how I think of it now. That young gal from California the other day too — in fact all of collosal coastal California — seemed without “it.” (But I would myself never be without it.)

Collapsed but concentrated pose of figure reading from something in his lap: arm of the hand holding the drink and elbow of the arm holding the phone seeming to compose a triangle with the head; the whole structure sagging toward the reading material in lap.  (Structure rendered unsound by this degree of thoughtful concentration in the head. This slump)

Trying to understand what has happened to my sandwich: the top is now too dark, while the bottom is inexplicably almost moist. The bottom is certainly not at all hot. (How long had I been making this sandwich?)

Customer was not himself a numismatist but did work closely with a numismatist.

Customer on family vacation to Mexico. Customer asked a buddy to help him carry a special chunk of limestone he’d found weighing 125 lbs. but the buddy was so strong he just lifted it on top of his shoulder.

It made no sense, the customer said, that she had only foreign currency, but tomorrow — TOMORROW it would make sense.

Best habit the customer’d ever had — keeping a diary, everyday for some twenty years– “stocks, sport’s scores, books, medical.”

Customer in search of Turkey Hill “decadent delights” — with magazine cutout and hot on the trail — “Just look at these things.”

Plan for the morning — read in the rose garden [of the apartment complex.]

Customer hoped he wasn’t “talking out of school” but saw in the upsurge of LGBTQ communities an indication we were at the cusp of evolutionary change. (Maybe: we were changing nature and nature was changing us.)

Customer had been struck by car while jaywalking. “Why did you hit me?” he asked driver. “I didn’t see you,” driver replied. (Not seriously hurt, a sore knee, said girlfriend.)

Customer working part-time at ABC store. (Was it busy?) Yeah it was busy (what were people buying?) Stuff for spritzers. (What were spritzers?) Champaign-y mixed drinks that were refreshing on hot days.

Handle of dry mop became detached from the head of the dry mop. On vacuuming, I discovered and held to the light, like some miraculous object, the screw that had held them together.

Intersection: man training dog with treat.
Crack: from triangle apex to triangle base, a scrawled shaky line.
Crack: what should be a V-shaped crack is technically a Y-shaped crack because of a very small scrawl from the tip.
Twig: uncommonly parallel to sidewalk’s grooves.
Thought: “that twig is so uncommonly parallel to the sidewalk’s grooves someone may have placed it that way.”
Counter-thought: “no, twigs have to fall some-wise. Nature’s not so averse to the appearance of what humans may consider parallelism or perfection that it absolutely avoids that sort of orientation.”
Recalled: dark muck on the rocks beside the water; grey trunks of large dead trees in the water, which you will see plentifully of along the Potomac.
Noticed: looks like new jumper cables, coiled in grass.
Recall: a girlfriend long ago telling me how much she hated her parents — and I’d blown that off at the time as her being dramatic or hyperbolic, but now I think, no, she probably really did hate her parents, and I had never quite seen that about her.
Counter-thought: yet people can be poor advocates and witnesses of themselves and their parents.
Pedestrian: looks like Faulkner in his 50’s but taller and with sadder expression.

I went out; did so more than once;

did shop for food; did run for excercise;

and while within, I turned on music

(which I do infrequently) , The Shinelles

(whom I’d never heard)

and others I’ll not encounter again.

At one point having gone back in

To find something to keep off the wind.

Curling arms of sunlight, ridges of leaves, rolling wave of leafs (leafs or leaves this time?) up the hill. (Huh?) A hill of wind defying the one of road and earth, autumn breaking its crest there. (Say what?) Skid of leaf on concrete (no) lift it all up by the axilla (…. no)

Grass that stabbed at the onslaught of the atmosphere leaving this — a dew — wounded atmosphere having sighed this — ” its blood of heat or sigh of cold.” (YES! but also — “no”– atmosphere walking on  bed of nails so leaving this grass with dew.)

Woke with the question, why did Greil Marcus think music was so important? (Marcus actually answers this himself Lipstick Traces, pp.140). Looked up charivari and its pronunciation. Read articles on how to distinguish fake wheat from real whole wheat products. Looked up Nazi in Wikipedia to re-establish a point I’ve been making with people, that the Nazi inclusion of “socialism” in their name was mere window-dressing to appeal to workers, and did not indicate real belief in socialist principles (which I believe I got from Richard Evans); however, the wiki page seems to assert that they did believe in socialist principles for non-Jewish Germans — so now I don’t know. (Hitler was against Unions and redistribution of property, I tell people. “Hardly a socialist.”) Article in Times about a fossil graveyard in Nevada; why were there so many ichthyosaur fossils in the same place? (Seems to have been a sort of ichthyosaur spawning ground.)

Before setting Age of Innocence down for the night, I flipped through the Norton edition’s critical supplements in the back and came across a letter from Wharton to Sinclair Lewis. . . . and awoke thinking was I doing the work or was I doing that which distracted from, or impeded, the work? did I even understand the work? did I know what it was? (Now nearing fifty I would have to say, based on my experience — that I was not doing the work but was not impeding anyone I knew of from doing it either. I was far away from any work, being a hopeless individual. Not even wanting entry into the building where the work is done, lest they tell me to “stop fooling.”)

Also that night I’d read the Floundering Four section of Gravity’s Rainbow. Having been made to laugh out loud by it, quite uncommon for me, I was also reminded of the ethos that guided my youthful appreciation of music — The Replacements were a sort of Floundering Four — and perhaps here too was something about the [] that I didn’t get enough at the time. (Oh I floundered but unintentionally, except at intervals.)

If there is to be a true resistance to the alliance of military, governmental and corporate interests, this Counterforce must itself be unruly and floundering, like Karl Marx maybe, — but Lenin and Marx were not “floundering.” You can’t fight order with order but must fight it with a kind of creative chaos. Stop making sense is how you fight the powers that be. Against General Patton you send Director Fellini. (Counterpoint: you need to make sense in a functional Democracy. You need to provide the electorate with a reasonable alternative to the pomp and clamor of an insane political party like one of the ones we have.)

Attendant asked to open a lidded container with his “strong hands” — (also couldn’t get it.)

Attendant asked to open supposedly stuck lidded container, which opened like it was a container that wasn’t stuck — (it wasn’t stuck.)

Attendant asked to open lidded container: performed the “ole hot water trick” and couldn’t get it either, (“just couldn’t be done,” was his report.)

Attendant, having been asked to open a lid another couldn’t, did so, and felt with its pop in his “strong hands,” a satisfaction amounting to pride.

(Should look up etymology of whoosh.) From 19th century, the machine age. Did anything really “whoosh” before then? Did Homer describe the chariots’ “whoosh”? (whistle of arrows perhaps.)

Word ‘book’ is from ‘beech’ apparently and French ‘livre’ from a Latin word indicating a tree’s interior bark.

“Kicking the bark” — if I could know the etymological roots of each word and part of a word in that phrase, what might it tell me about the action described by the phrase? “Kick” as a sound implies an idea of kicking and the sound “bark” implies an idea of bark, and how do those ideas measure up to the action I’ve just performed? If “kicking the bark” were “sludging the ferb” would that be what I had just done?

(One could imagine a temple as a place where etymologies would ring out. Not the etymologies of altar, prayer, of religious topics, but of air, ceiling, and rug. In holy places one breathes in not air but the etymology of air.) Where one breaths in together the science of air and the science of the word of air.

Metamorphasis — Kafka story — (Max Brod title?) — Metamorphases — the Ovid work. The “dark matter” of continuous perception — our heads filled much more of the emptiness of space than our actions and most of all our talking would seem to indicate. Where the universe is hypothesized to be full of black unfound mass, we have sight, sound and tactile sensation, seeming to be something but actually insubstantial. Perhaps looking into outer-space is like confronting a human mind, wherein stars are words. Walking around with nothing in my head; other times, all my “thought” is a rehearsal — the mind doesn’t “think” but is just “backstage” with ideas tried on, parts repeated.

Chain link fence for backyard of John’s old house put in. Junk car with good music playing out of it I can’t place. Asia-pacific man middle-aged medium height, little hair, phone in right hand: “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” A deer manifesting on your right: his long brown solid flank observed. Remembering, all of sudden, I was kind of a screwed up guy — a simple but acute case — though I wouldn’t really know it until later. I would just glimpse it now. Will seem like just the prick of a pin could do it, make me a person without a hangup. I would be delivered of my cartoon status…. “Not just familiar with everything along here but with everything’s shadow along here,” I think as I see once again those shadows of conifers which are like crenellations to the shadow of the fence, “their passage through the year and day.”

Couldn’t tell sex of driver with certainty. Curly hair, overweight, thick glasses. The question of what quality observed would have made that figure — androgynous in its quick passing — seem of one gender or another. Bosom, lip, mustache, a slender finger. Eyesight prejudicial that way: makes you feel like you, a speck of the world, contain the world. A speck in this speck makes you think you know it all: the speck of a thought in the speck of a head in the speck of a person that calls itself “knowing.” Bottom of Abingdon hill: “Feels like I’ve been thinking for the first time in a while –why” (It was the Dostoyevsky passage I’d read today. “World seems so full” when there are things to think.) Dostoyevsky: we are responsible for everyone else. (The earth is what a full thought looks like while without a thought we’re like outerspace, both too much and too little.)

An extraordinary heat generated by my “knee compression sleeves” as I step outside. These knee sleeves are a marvel to all the people in the coffee shop and all the people all around here. Heh buddy what do you go on your knees? (“Sparks from Knee Sleeves” might be the sort of song I write, bring it to a guy, “got this great hit on my hands” and he’s like “what is it” and when I tell him, “Sparks from My Knee Sleeves”, he grabs me by the elbow and says you stick with me kid, funny how it is those everyday things everyone can relate to like your baking hot “knee compression sleeves” that propel you to fame in the end. Only now the guy I trusted has ripped me off: he’s got my fame and fortune too, which who cares, but he’s running off in my ‘sleeves’ –)

Science, while seeming like a good deal, has brought humanity nearer to the brink of destruction than anything else thus far.

What were the thoughts that inspired your dejection today? (Good, now pack all that up because no one wants to hear it.)

Older woman using a weed whacker where a lawn mower would make more sense. Reminds me of the time I used the dust broom to clean the customer area instead of the dry mop so that a colleague had to take me aside to point out that the big one was a little faster. How the sound of its whirring sputters as it encounters what sounds like a thick tuft of grass.

Customer’s password recalled: “Hen.”

Everything seemingly reasonably well-mowed except the two maximally unruly tufts that stand at either side of that sewer’s opening, there in the median. Here, a square of concrete bordered by a longer trapezoidal wedge of it as the sidewalk fans around the street corner. Question: imagine this is the story of a person walking, that these are the thoughts of a person as he walks, how would one best measure the ratio of steps to thoughts? Or just to give us a start somewhere: would it be truer to say the spaces between words are analogous to the physical steps or that the punctuation between phrases was more analogous? Initial [step] response [step]: the spaces look more like steps and the words look more like thoughts but actually one can think a lot in a step. A whole walk of thought can occur within a step, as it were, while words are only the unpacking of a step. One doesn’t think a lot in a step but it takes a lot of words to describe what one has thought and a lot of repetition to give a sense for how it happened.

The gentle steps the Latin man made as he approached the stop light, the Ethiopian man’s flat sandals in the dust. How big the sky could seem when walking down 28th Street where they had lost some trees: Why would you observe such tedious details but for the thought that life is mainly composed of such tediousness — and that life is good? “life is tedious and life is good.”

Then there are cars. Many cars, it occurs to one. Both ways. “One hears their passage through the air, whoosh, but only sees their passage over ground–” often true.

Sound of the woman’s shoe on the asphalt of the bike path as she discovers the dead deer.

Eyes and pointed ears, surrounded by fur, in that house window — intensity of the gaze on me.

Candy wrappers — about one every ten feet. A very obvious literary allusion doesn’t occur to me — but the experience.

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