.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

I was okay with having woken late in the morning, since I was awake for more of the night than I could handle. So much to handle, at 2 am, at 4 am, I had to pick up the Emerson.

I laughed, I shut the book, I read L’Homme and La Mer, I turned off the light, I laughed, I failed to return to sleep. I listened to “I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink” and did just sit there and drink. Though I failed to return to sleep, I did not turn on the light, or sit there and drink. I did not try to read Emerson. I lay there alone and patient in the dark. “I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Think.”

Sometimes, I thought how that one passage of Emerson seemed to relieve the moral imperative of another passage. Sometimes I felt anxious that I was not asleep, and of what that would mean for me the next day at work, and sometimes I would tell myself “don’t think, don’t think–” for it was Thought, I imagined, that was somehow keeping me awake, rather than what was keeping me awake keeping me thinking — thinking “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.”

Then I woke with pleasant dreams and I spent some of the time lying there, trying to live again in my dreams, my dreaming self being spatially so close to my conscious self it seemed incomprehensible that I couldn’t shift back and forth. I spent some of the time, knowing I would be lying there for a while, seeing if those “visions,” (what are they called again?*), on the insides of my eye lids would appear (I’d been looking for them too in the middle of the night) then rose for work.

* phosphenes.

Yglesias: “All the places whose ‘character’ one might want to preserve were created during periods of openness to change.”

A passage in Walden reminding me that birds don’t have “backwards knees”: rather, what we think are their knees are in fact their ankles…. (What did the Archaic English word ‘yclept’ mean again?) (It meant “Named, called.” “He was yclept Paul,” for example). Photography was a technology and so was writing, but didn’t linguistic thinking precede imagistic thinking? Wasn’t Thought essentially verbal?

Making preparations for a guest. Wheel chair and other medical apparatus *outta here* (the guest needs lively invigorating sights and entertainments, not wheel chairs, pill bottles, bandages, gait belts, blood pressure monitors, elaborate harnesses for arms and chests, “grabbers”… or maybe I can wheel my guest around in the chair, if things get sufficiently lively, maybe I can achieve a meaningful type of holding with these “grabbers”…?) A new cutting board because food borne pathogens may be alright for the attendant (though he’s not actually all that crazy about them) but they are not alright for his guests!

Thought is essentially verbal not visual or aural, I tell you, I don’t know why. There is a reason that scientific papers aren’t written in music. (And there is a reason, too, that often they contain a lot of math, I admit.)

Derek Thompson: “The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor.”

CNN: But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

KYIV INSIDER: “There’s a real fear now that the U.S. will turn off support mid-fight,” said a senior European defense official who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Trump already did it to Ukraine. No one wants to be next.”
The issue is not just technical — it’s political. Many of the systems at the heart of NATO’s warfighting capacity, including long-range missile platforms and air defense networks, require not just hardware, but continuous U.S. cooperation for updates, targeting, and operational integration. That cooperation now feels conditional.”

I have never experienced what they call a runner’s high, but I will say that, during long runs my experience of time will be altered.

Having gone 8 miles I will turn around and think, wow, I’m a long way from home, this will take me forever to get back! but then by some process that I never get to the bottom of, I get closer and closer to home — then I’m home.

This is a new one from me, a long one, though it is basically a stitching together (rhapsodizing???) of old ideas. The attempt indeed was to stitch together some of my oddest ideas. I tentatively call it…. Self Respect and Freedom of Thought

I will say it would be nice to have an editor rather than just conceding that tediousness is part of my style. This could be a valid application of A.I. — as valid as having an editor anyway — but I haven’t yet made the experiment.

(exactly where) (exactly how, now or when) (or later) here (then lifts up, feels, his perpetual feeling of hand).

“Lower down, higher up” ; “neither ahead nor now”; “neither later yet ahead”: (in need of a decision, someone else in him/her/them arises to make it. Someone besides — some one literally beside — the one who saw a need for a decision — decides.)

Cut grasses, placed rocks, a parking sign, landscaped trees, their hue and kind with the embossment of the hour, with the background of the cloud….

The sun beam hit the cloud curve then landed on the trees’ tips. (hm)

“Trees like runway models on lane tops and phone trunks, a seductive drapery of street designs” (hm)

Stuttering sign language across the intersection as well (hm)

Odysseus said to have been wider than he was tall when seated — because he was barrel-chested not because he was fat. (True.) Yet why had the tale of fat Odysseus not yet been written? Was it because Don Quixote was the actual fat Odysseus? (Quite true.)

These trees are from a synthesizer. This copse is an all 80’s station. Cellophane shrink wrap is covering this wall street (Quite true.)

« Néanmoins, dit-il, les passions, violentes ou non, ne doivent jamais être exprimées jusqu’au dégoût, et la musique, même dans les situations les plus horribles, ne doit pas affecter l’oreille, mais la flatter et la charmer, et par conséquent rester toujours musique. » (*, *)

Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs…

“There was also a malicious satisfaction he had in the blamelessly Christian stamp his activities bore — it was so clear that on no ground whatever, either the military or the humanistic and pedagogic, were they open to any serious reproach.” (Magic Mountain, Chapter 5, “The Dance with Death.”)

“Could not be a fire”¹“That there could not be a fire becomes a proof there could be one”² “That I don’t hear a fire engine does not mean I haven’t started one”³ “whether or not you hear a fire engine has not to do with what you may have done”⁴ “You could have started a fire” ⁵ “Prepare in advance for the sound of the engine” ⁶ “Believe it’s unrelated to what you may have done.”⁷

_{¹ There is no evidence to support the idea that you have started a fire. The concern that you have done this is groundless.
² “Nothing in life is certain so the uncertain is likely”; “I strongly believe I haven’t started a fire; therefore, I probably have started one.” “Bad things most often occur unexpectedly; I have no reason to expect a bad thing; therefore a bad thing is more likely to occur.”
³ Were I to hear a fire engine it wouldn’t mean that I had started a fire and were I not to hear one wouldn’t mean that I hadn’t. This is Obvious.
⁴ The principle on which the previous thought is based. I can’t deduce that my house is on fire (or that I have caused my house to be on fire) merely from the fact that I have or have not seen a fire engine: the fire engine merely puts in mind what I may have done.
⁵ Nothing is certain: even if there is no reason to think I have started a fire, or even many reasons to think that I haven’t, I may yet have started a fire.
⁶ Knowing that the sight of a fire engine will put it in mind that you’ve started a fire, you can take precautionary measures and mentally prepare yourself against feeling anxiety on this account. “I may or may not have started a fire” you might tell yourself for example, “but it won’t be because I have seen a fire engine.”
⁷ Same as the previous thought.}

Stone, soil, root, leaf litter, leaves, approaching indistinguishability in this woody spot.

Funny how, in having a partner (though I don’t even have one, I’m just imagining having one) all my lamenesses seem concretized.

A theory about why when talking to myself, I will say such senseless phrases as the one I just now said “no refunds or credit”: that these are the random words that happen to be passing through my brain at the same time as I have an uncomfortable thought.

So if, for example, I happen to think that phrase “no refunds or credit” at the moment I recollect there’s an important test I have to take tomorrow, I will repeat that phrase aloud as if it were a weighty utterance, which somewhat staves off the uncomfortable thought. “No refunds… no credit.”

Reading something about London/ Londinium it occurred to me I didn’t know where that name comes from. Turns out it’s not really known.

Tweet (Hanania): “It’s funny when members of a mob say people don’t have courage for not giving in to it.”

My arms enter the wide cotton hole at the bottom then separately exit each smaller cotton hole toward the top, with the crown of my head in hot pursuit through a hole of medium size in the center

(this is probably a bit cute but of course the holes are not *of* cotton but defined by, circumscribed by cotton)

So now I find that my chest has been covered. My chest is now thoroughly sheathed and prepared, is the finding. (I have no thought at all for the Back or its sheathing, though I’m certain it, too, has been covered and prepared.)

Now I’m smoothing the shirt out and recalling the Greek word for Back actually means “behind the chest.” (Thersites was struck “behind the chest” by Odysseus, was why I knew that Old Greek word — which caused a tear to well in the eye of Thersites and a bloody welt to arise from his back.

I do not yet today have any such welt on my back, I reflect. MAGA is something like Thersites, I next consider — ugly, thumbing its nose at authority.)

Now I’m still smoothing the whole thing out, quite sheathed, front and back, and prepared:

I am a person in his shirt, feeling sheathed; I am a person observing his prepared abdomen and chest; I am a person assessing that, as of this moment, his shirt has been sufficiently smoothed.

κύβος: cube, cubical die