.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

More and more the squirrel should be the dominant symbol in this area, giant statues of squirrels and robins comprising the only public artworks …. More and more people asking about Apple Pay. More and more people producing their Amex. People with Amex will generally have something else to pay with but people with Apple Pay generally have nothing else to pay with and are generally not carrying a purse or wallet. Question: might a sparrow flock in a “murmuration” or is it just the starling? But that was just four or five of them diving in and out of a bush with big berries and could by no means constitute a “murmuration” even supposing that sparrows might qualify. Question: is the “angry white man” the underinformed underemployed alcoholic guy or is it the tech wiz with a well-trimmed beard who will use the data to forge a better world? (Perhaps an angry-sad vs. angry-glad distinction is needed.) Alcohol poisoning: day after, one continues to feel the salubrious effects, shattering hesitations, “the hardened thought floes are breaking….!” Gal walking in front of me: pass her when she adjusts her shoe. The world without it’s paint: a Greek statue, the colorization of film, metal, plastic, concrete…. Branch shadow across the grass so dark like a sturdy plank you could board up the neighboring window with. Pedestrian: whole body lurches left with his left step, whole body lurches to his right with his right step. Driver: turn signal indicating a right turn but no apparent intention of turning. Me: I always see this gap between buildings but I never look into the gap; now I’m looking into it and what do I see — a straight sidewalk going farther than I’d expected then disappearing beneath distant trees. Brother, says the convenience store clerk, addressing me, as I step up to him with my beer, could you turn around and tell me what that chair is over there? “Which?” “The chair, the name of the chair! Under the doorway of the storage place where the light…” “Oh, a chair, that’s a rocking chair.” “A rocking chair!” says the clerk. “A rocking chair! Brother, all my life I have wanted one of those chairs!” Long cloud against sky doesn’t attract your notice but its long shadow, deeper, across the pavement, attracts it…. Work crew on bridge; frail young woman with her dog and cane; an old man stretching his legs. Where the retaining wall ends and the two fences don’t quite meet: a small triangular grassy no man’s land, which is an essential attribute of Property, like the paper that’s left once you’ve cut a shape out of it. A lifelong sadness: not growing old; not lack of success; not adolescence (though it seemed to arise then), a lifelong gloom. Rs in this lot designate Reserved while Vs in this other lot designate Visitor. Band aid face down on the pavement, as if one were looking up from the wound. Squirrel, as if having only been waiting for me to look at it, suddenly leaps backwards behind a fence post. Jelly of light (song conceived) Heh Babe, it’ll be alright if we got the bread of the sky, and we got the peanut butter of the night/ to go with the jelly of light…?” [No.]

Trying to button with one hand the top button of my buttondown shirt, which I’ve put on inside out. This is important because the zipper of my fleece fell off and my bare throat is exposed to the first morning chill of the season. Seems improbable since I went just before leaving, but not five minutes out I begin to receive the first intimations of needing to go again…. There are times when the chill it gives me from within meet those the wind gives me from without, and I feel a kind of ecstatic cold — “A suffusing ecstatic cloud of cold inside and out,” I write. Went to push up the bill of my baseball cap but was wearing, in fact, a handknitted woolen watchcap, which has no bill, so my hand kept going up. Squirrel running after squirrel. Squirrel in the lead turns at a right degree angle while the one in pursuit keeps going straight, then both come to a full stop equidistant from the point where their paths had diverged. They are still standing stock still as I pass, staring. Something white at my feet: I’ve come all this way with my pantleg tucked into my sock. “Beneath the underdog” meant to me — you were so far behind that people were no longer rooting for you — if you won there was actually something kind of wrong with the contest, the standards weren’t being observed. (I’m sure Mingus meant something very different by the title of this book, but it was decades ago that I read it and only the title has stuck.) You say all your actions are “performative,” that there is no actual you, and everything is for some real or potential audience, but can you say your walking alone here is “performative”? That your thoughts are “performed”? (Response: It’s rehearsal, albeit with occasional attempts at finding a way out of the theater.)

Lollipop in wrapper in snow by pale blue surgical mask. Trees overburdened and bent over with snow. Backpack nearing end of its life, my very durable lightweight bag by Marmot. Perhaps the straps, which are frayed, are reparable. To the question, which is louder, the car moving through the air over a dry road or the car moving through the air over a wet road, the answer seems to depend on car speed: the slower the car, the lower the volume of the sound produced by it moving through the air, which can then be overwhelmed by the sound of it on the wet pavement. Allowing someone to pass through the narrowed strip by the bent tree. Woman with dogs making way for me. Escarpment: among those words I feel underconfident using. Does the shop sit on an escarpment? “Satchel” full of ideas and observations — I mean the one at the top of my spinal column — how many can be recorded before falling out of the back of the sack. How many before the Sack develops irreparable ripped straps and holes. Will always associate childhood friend John C. with the word “satchel” (which was a big word to me then.) Will always associate childhood friend Aaron A. with the word “escarpment” which he, a professor now, uses in his book about Civil War guerilla fighters. Telephone pole by the bus stop and its sign cluster. Of which the Historians of the Future will say: “had he only known what he was looking at, he would have solved the Great Riddle of The Age.” (Instead of there being absolutely nothing in this bus stop shell by this no parking sign and traffic sign near the corner of 16th Street South, there was the answer to The Great Riddle of The Age, it was suggested to me.) What was the great riddle of the age? A small screw encased in clear ice. Kicking an ice chunk in the expectation of watching it skip off, only to find it is as intransigent as an exposed bit of a much larger embedded stone. Like kicking a tree trunk. Therefore, I do not kick but step on the next such ice chunk, but this one unexpectedly slides beneath the pressure, with a faint “crunch” which is not a “crack.” You then kick this little one which, spinning off, hits the snow bank and tumbles back, which evokes that moment from months ago when you kicked a pebble in the path and, rather than skipping into the grass, it completed a full circle and hit you in the shoe (What if I were like a law of Physics, and gravity was essentially a huge version of myself, kicking things and stepping on things as it went about it’s usual routine? Perhaps it’s instructive to think of ourselves as physical laws? We don’t like to think of ourselves as not free, but we might like to if we considered ourselves unfree in the same way Laws were.) (Counterargument: actually you’ve managed to identify the very problem people have, which is that people *do* think of themselves laws, and don’t consequently think of themselves as needing to be obedient to laws.) Idea that this thing is a kind of haiku, either very wordy or with the notion of the syllable somewhat enlarged. Idea that if it comes to have three sections, like the three lines of a haiku, I will rename it haiku. “Last syllable of record time” is a great line obviously: to measure time as a syllable as a poet must. Reflective chrome ring in the gutter: one suspects this was formerly part of a car lamp or flash light. Stressed utility cord, yanked from something. Justin Timberlake comes to mind: the walk signs to my left flash in syncopation. He was in the band NSYNC. Idea that this is what this is really about: not about my walk or commute and the things along it and the experience of walking as such or of ordinariness as such or of what may be remarked upon about a walk in which nothing quite remarkable happens: but about these scant minutes between when I arrive at work and when I have to get dressed for work in which I’m racing — often very much racing — to write down something/ anything that this walk of three miles inspired today. But I do have to get ready for work right now — pants today as it’s liable to be cold upstairs.

Would call that a stick while that is a twig and that is a cone and that is a leaf. So uniformly gray in the sky: a thick gray layer, a light gray layer, a medium gray layer. Pedestrian takes two steps into the street then, perceiving a danger, takes the same two steps back so smoothly and adroitly I feel I am watching a tape being rewound. I am actually convinced for a moment I am watching something on videotape, just as, for a moment driving the other day, I couldn’t recognize the car I was driving. Was anything I was doing real? I am surprised to have scraped the bottom of my right shoe against the uneven pavement of the walkway two times and tell myself not to do it a third time — then I do it a third time. Seemed that the pickleball player would first plant his foot and then strike the ball, but when I “played back” in my memory what I’d heard, the ball sound would precede the sneaker sound. I’m gazing at running gals’ pony tails again. “The period of this one seems about double that of the others and will occasionally become briefly stranded on the right shoulder,” I note. “There is something exceedingly vigorous, yet spindly, about this brown tail.” Idea: if I could, understand all the editorial decisions that comprised my writing style, I would have “supreme self-knowledge.” Counter idea: professional athletes, I’m sure, evaluate and anatomize their style all the time, and it may lead to increased performance but not to character insights, let alone to “supreme self-knowledge.”

V-shaped twig by Y-shaped crack, H-shaped twig by gravel stone with a triangle face. Flattened Wendy’s cardboard package for fries or similar side dish. Laundry scent from that house: the not so serious thought that I would like to leap into the scented covers… 37.2 trillion cells in the body, I’d read that morning. Two round white landscaping stones not near any sort of landscaping. The two white stones that leaned on a tree on the race course for the funeral games of Patroclus: marking where the turn is made. These white stones. One step landing within the blond curbing, one step landing upon the black asphalt, as I enter the lower parking lot of what is called The Arlington. The tennis players, man and woman: woman with a better backhand than the man, man with better forehand than the woman, woman in general better than the man, whose returns will go gracelessly high, and slow, above the net, an apparent amateurishness, which then, suddenly, a powerful and confident forehand will belie. Now it’s the woman who mishits: she’s rushed forward and the ball has struck in the crook between the frame and strings… (Idea that sportswriting, or really sportscasting, might be the future of writing, only not about sports, but “the play-by-play of all existence.” The role A.I. might have in that is in describing experiences humans can’t have.) Recalling that Squirrel’s heads enlarge in winter so as to better recollect where they’ve buried their nuts.

Cat on the path. The up and down of my head over the revolving scythe of my steps. (Curiosity: Walking while looking at my feet I feel suddenly in danger of stumbling, which would not be the case on uneven ground, or were I looking ahead.) In this grassy corner, a single patch of dirt, and upon that single bare patch a substantial swarm of ants. Dry leaf fragments in curb, metal beer cask clang in a cavernous beer delivery truck, wall-eye of a rabbit or hare fixed on upon you. Ironically here, in writing, where you’re supposed to perform, your tendency instead is to be stodgily or tediously sincere sounding and factual and  “real,” not playing or performing for an audience as in this case you should. How do you explain that? It’s almost as if you’ve gotten utterly turned around…. Truck hauling portable toilets. Woman telling dog there was nothing to see in Cleveland Park. (There were things in Cleveland Park she did not want him to see, she later clarified.) Reminding me I had been “touched by Molly” the previous night — her long brown nose into my coat. Owner pulling hard at the leash but the leash was full of slack so the long brown nose remained in my coat. Car cutting across my track while I’m in the crosswalk and have the light, a white middle aged dude, sunglasses, a mid-size SUV. He’s thinking nows his chance, there’s just enough room…!. and now that he’s passed he’s thinking I wasn’t going to hit you, give me a breakyu moron (It is that old pattern of hyper-aggressiveness followed by hyper-defensiveness, I imagine.) What would be the best way to cool off my cap, which I’ve removed on this day I’ve overdressed for, convex or concave to the wind? or at 90 degrees? Find there is a piece of paper, hole puncher sized, stuck in its woolen blue fibers which I pluck out and flick off. I then reply with a thought that is voiced to a thought that has not been voiced — no, that is not littering.

From that movie Celebrity, actress Judy Davis having said — now I’m everything I always hated and I’m so much happier. How would your life look, upside down like that? Don’t you want to be everything you’ve hated? Chased around Troy everyday by the idea he might ever heroically act and being slain every day by the knowledge he never heroically could (Every day a new circuit of the walls — of dread) Couldn’t remember French word for “itching” — four syllables began with ‘d.’ This was while taking a bit of a detour on Monroe (how hard it is for me to make even the slightest detour!): couldn’t remember that word which began with ‘a’ and might have had gnosis in it that described the point in Greek drama where the protagonist has a great realization that changes everything for him or her. Would need to look that up again. I, myself, seemed beyond the aid of what we call realization. I realized, didn’t I? But what I realized hadn’t “turned the key.” I realized like the tragic protagonist did, then — nothing. Then hava nagila started playing in my mind — a combination of exterior rhythms, with a certain scraping of my steps, having gotten the song going in my head, though I have not heard it played in a decade at least. That had seemed a funny song to us as kids, often accompanied by demonstrative dancing, but it is an Isreali folk song, I now read. Was our African foreign policy unpragmatic? The neo-colonialism of Russian at least brings order to the C.A.R, but perhaps that only perpetuated the cycle of violence. They were brutal, the foreign service officer had credibly told me. One loved Faulkner because of the writing of Faulkner but one loved the idea of Faulkner because he’d beaten them (Them); i.e., he was a scrapper, as customer Natasha would say. (What was the name of Faulkner’s house again? Rowan Oaks.) To jog to the light would be to increase pressure on the bladder, yet to miss the light, and hence prolong the journey, would be likely also to pressure the bladder, albeit later. Therefore, jog to the light.

…The siren, as it approaches, sounds alarming, as if you must watch out; but the siren, as it retreats, sounds deflated, as if you had been a disappointment. You keep telling yourself to be Cervantes not Quixote but it’s not working. Pray and keep moving, had said the customer, but hadn’t you so far displayed the opposite principle — get stuck and keep fretting? I had, I had…. This issue of ‘stuckness’ comes up again and again, always getting more and not less stuck. Snakily is a word and one you have unexpectedly applied to that long straight shadow over the uneven ground. It’s better to spit toothpaste into the toilet when it’s flushing, because the flushing disturbs the surface tension, I guess it is, and the toothpaste you’ve spit won’t splash up at you — was a similar phenomenon now to be observed in the sound of this passing traffic? Was the reason I couldn’t hear the truck in the distant lane because the two cars travelling parallel to it, in the near lane, had disturbed the “surface tension” of the air, as it were, so that the “large truck sound” was so shuffled and sifted about as to be effectively neutralized and made silent? feathervescent, a tower of seed alive with brown wings. Ethic of the mundane — perhaps the only ethic of mundanity — might be: don’t dramatize the mundane; or turn non-events into events; or make something out of nothing, especially by exaggerating. To the contrary, when something seems to be happening, don’t be fooled: it is actually meaningless mundanity. (Crypto-currency might be a good instance in society at large of a nothing that people make something of.) So (a) don’t make something out of nothing (b) don’t exaggerate (c) buy and hold (d) those are the rules of an average day. (To the question of “how do you distinguish real events from dramatic-seeming non-events, I would apply the “good is never tempting” test: if it costs you something to believe a certain proposition, it just might be the case.) Singular and formidable: that mangolia tree on the plot of the firehouse, now impressively lit by the sun.

And how, according to you, have we become ‘infantilized’? Why have we become ‘inadult’ do you say exactly? Technology or maybe as a symptom of late stage (or early stage) civilization: Technology either very indirectly (we pollute the land, we ingest the fruit of the land, we ourselves become changed, polluted) or more directly (economic disruptions leading to political disruptions leading to psychological disruptions) or even more directly (“social media.”) Another possibility is wealth: that we’ve grown wealthy and therefore, also, extremely silly. 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. Pedestrian: looks like Faulkner in his 50’s but taller and with sadder expression. The Faulkner who still worked at the post office — success having made him happier, yes, but also shorter. “I don’t know the names of tree varieties,” it suddenly occurs to me, “not because I haven’t studied them enough but because they don’t want me to know.” Envious of some Flaubert passage or other as I again stare into that snarl of vegetation and overgrowth beneath the overpass, confined to the triangle whose sides are long concrete curbs for drainage; how richly that would be described if one had a way with words. Struggling to recall what you call that type of window meanwhile: Sun roofs …. Sunlights … Sun lamps …. Skylights. The perception of the lobes of the pedestrian’s attractive backside seeming to become briefly the lobes of my own brain, and the cloth of the shorts caught where the lobes meet like a twisting fabric caught also in the lobes of my brain.

Idea that what makes Ulysses a novel is that Joyce knows everything Bloom does not know while what makes this a memoir is that I am as ignorant as my subject. Not kicking a 7-11 cup in the road, becoming careful to avoid even stepping near it. (a) for to kick it would be to acknowledge it, and to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge something might need to be done about it. One SHOULD pick up litter (categorical imperative.) However, “To do good is not necessarily to do well” ( it could mean being a do-gooder.) Wasn’t sanitary to pick up cup without proper equipment (health conscious). Beneath my station to pick up the cup (should a person with a role demanding dignity pick up a flattened cup?) It wasn’t beneath me but nevertheless wasn’t my job to pick up the cup (such is the complexity of today’s world that if I do another’s job for them, I am more likely to create than to solve a problem.) “He who’s last is first”: even if it’s bad for society, for your own sake stoop to pick up the cup. Question of how the question would change if you actually saw the person drop the cup. Say you care enough to pick up the cup, would you care enough to tell the person not to drop it? Would you care enough to interact with that person in a caring and constructive manner or even in an impatient unproductive manner? … Nearest 7-11 about a mile to the left, I note, though the cup could have of course come from anywhere. Now a person in the distance I thought was walking away from me turns out in fact to be a person in the distance cycling toward me. Might be a good metaphor for how little sense of myself I have: sometimes very outgoing, sometimes very retiring, as if I were different people. Odd the difference a woman on a construction site makes: getting a hi and a smile as she sweeps the dust off the new sidewalk instead of the usual wall of silence and stoic disregard. Now they’re repaving the street again, which I would have otherwise said was in perfectly good condition.

11th Street. I’m digging in my backpack, for a pencil probably, when a person passing me calls out. “Heh are you the guy that works over there? [Points in the direction from which I’ve just come.] Do you still work there?” (I make sounds of assent. I recognize him.) “And you still walk home, what is it, ten miles?” “Three — three miles,” I say. “Amazing,” he says, as if three miles were as many as ten, “just . . . amazing…”

What’s truly amazing, I think as I leave, is that I believe that me and this very same person had this exact same encounter about ten years ago. Exactly the same, only two blocks to the East where my route went then. Two blocks and ten years ago.

Q: on the geologists twitter page, when she asked her community what were the most important attributes of a geologist, what answer was the most overwhelmingly given? (The capacity to think in terms of very long periods of time. The ability to work with incomplete data sets, was another)  For two days having drawn blood with my toilet tissue, to discover later it had been caused by an exterior cut, a ridiculous version of Dostoyevsky’s mock execution or like the hypochondriacal Mickey’s experience in Hannah and her Sisters, I’m thinking of (while remembering the bright drawn blood). I recall my intense feeling for “the vanity of life” over those two days, groping for things worth meaning when I thought I was dying and finding none. Thinking of the difference now between “core samples” and “slide samples” of Time.  Core Samples were just history: a subject over time. Slide Samples were attempts to unpack as fully as possible fleeting moments of time, of which Ulysses or Wallace’s short story Good Old Neon and Duchamp’s idea of the ultramince and perhaps the whole genre of Haiku might be examples: it was all that was going on at a single moment in Time when you really unpacked it, as if time had stopped. You would think that a Core Sample of Time was essentially just Slide Samples of Time that had been stacked on top of each other, but in fact, it wasn’t so, for history was composed not of Moments but of Events, and Events were where Moments evanesced to nothing, which was why Time seemed to move so quickly when things were happening. (A Moment was Time dilated and an Event was Time evanesced. No one actually really experienced Events, which happened too quickly for our capacity to experience.) Were you to see a bunch of Slide Samples of Time stacked on one another you would think that nothing had ever occurred in History, in all Time, was the thought I had around here earlier that week, you would think only the present existed and that all language was poetry. Haiku are supposed to be about Nature but they are similar to Slide Samples of Time, I think, if you consider the momentary as being the natural where there is no nature but our own.