.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

Dominant sound: breeze on ears. Passing driver: female silhouette. Look left down sidewalk intersecting mine at right angle and see silhouette of three cleaning ladies walking abreast, aspects of their cleaning implements (a bucket, a broom, a spray bottle) contributing to its form. Two quick reports of a car horn just behind: someone having remotely locked or unlocked their parked car. Mulch around tree: a fragrant rich blemishless brown except for a single long green stalk. Blue jay flying over street directly over the zebra stripes, as if legally crossing from eight feet above. Driver: female, 30’s, black hair, short pony tail, a bloated face. Rounding the intersection in front of me, where I’m stopped, when their light turns: white old male driver in pickup; middle-aged African immigrant in blue sedan; youngish African American woman with bleached dreadlocks driving County bus. Torn off top of a plastic soda bottle looks like a badmitton what’s it called — (shuttlecock.) Idea of trying to get to know everyone on the south side of this County, over a hundred thousand people, that that was how you wrote a book. Helicopters: one of those things that remind you that this place, which could be anywhere, is actually here, near Washington, The Pentagon. (That has been a problem with my writing, I’ve come to think — that I refuse to admit, or am disinclined to believe, that I am anyone anywhere. If I only could accept the opposite premise, I will think. If only I could think this is Arlington in the early 21st century, for example, and that I am myself.)

Bird flashing by at knee height. Old woman I’ve made way for — when she looks me in the face, the expression is like she’s seen a ghost or something she doesn’t want to believe exists, eyes wide. (The moustache, maybe.) Making a food delivery, young man can’t find right address; he looks back and forth from his sheet to the house, then goes in the likeliest direction though he knows he’s already been that way. A sudden rattling sound draws my gaze to it: small business owner pulling a hand truck. I’m constantly feeling the occurrence of an abrasion on my left heel from a new shoe. “It’s over-reacting to say my father feels actual disdain for me,” I’m thinking, ” yet he’s taken my measure and thinks I’m ‘fine.’” Startling a squirrel, which makes a maladroit leap from the fence, I’m reminded of the household’s new cats, which are clumsy and not at all catlike. And there is finally the well-defined low ceiling of dark clouds that has in it bright chinks and cracks of morning sun.

Blur of my foot above the sidewalk’s pebble aggregate. A gently blown leaf’s slow scrape across the concrete toward me. Big Blue Machine tearing up the old tennis courts. Big Blue Machine leaves nothing of the old clay courts. Then, in an unguarded moment, chin up, chest out, adjusting a backpack strap, I’m struck directly in the thorax by a dry floating leaf. Like being struck hard by a shovel spade in the chest until the very moment of impact.

Generally you smell a cigar well in advance of seeing it, but in this instance, you saw the man’s hand in that special curled configuration first — and supposed it to be unlit — until you were well away. What had customer, who had himself stopped drinking, said about his friend who’d stopped drinking? “Like he’d lost his best friend.” Pedestrian, a Latina: as short relative to me as her hair is long relative to herself. (My notes: “her hair goes down from her, as she goes up to me.”) Woman: like Andromeda, lashed to the rock with arms outspread, leashed between two tiny diverging dogs.

Having read of the beguine care givers in the thirteenth century I wonder if another possible end to the story of this time of my life would be to “deepen my commitment to care.” But I find instantaneously that true care givers have cared for themselves first, and I ask myself: aren’t you the person in need of care?

Parolles is more than happy to be found out as a fraud so long as he is allowed to live, I reflect. You can do and suffer anything so long as it’s really you that does or suffers it, but that is the very nature of fear, that it makes you lose you so you have nothing to meet the danger with.

Customer: how, after putting his phone in his front pocket, he will look around him with chin elevated as if to compensate for having looked down. (No, I wasn’t looking down, he seems to say. What do you mean? I’m looking up!)

Nobel Prize for literature winner. Cycle is: my total indifference to the announcement of an author for the prize, whose selection I ascribe to merely political causes, only to read them for the first time years later, much impressed — How could I have missed this! Example: Coetzee.

A culture that you want to hate, that seems as if it should be hated, “the elite” but is actually often a few steps ahead of you in its thinking — miles ahead. You will sometimes think of yourself therefore as a rearguard but you are not exactly guarding against anything. More just not moving.

Manhole cover in grass, a tree stump look alike. It’s warmer than the season should permit, but nice.

The Non-Spherical Man

Or is the real problem — that one is not “spherical.” That these are the concerns of The Non-Spherical Man?… (I had come across a quote attributed to Federico Fellini: that one must live “spherically — in all directions at once.”) Now why could that not be one of their superhero movie superheroes — The Non-Spherical Man.

In the early versions of this comic strip, Non-Spherical Man is simply a square man who, while knowing that a measure of roundness is what’s called for in life, simply can’t manage to find anything remotely radial in himself. We are frequently disappointed in these early strips to find time and again N-S Man briefly acting like someone a little cool, rather calm, who takes it as it comes, who is not concerned with what They think, and so forth, but the roundness of the world finally works into the angularity of his soul and results inevitably in him having a freak out or in him otherwise being completely humiliated. Most N-S Man strips from this period end with N-S Man having some kind of major spastic event, revealing him to be totally uncool.

Facing flagging sales, the strip was re-envisioned in the 1960s, making the hero more misshapen than explicitly square, round in some ways, angular in others, each of these stories ending with the same ambiguous picture of the hero, looking out at the reader with the same hard to read expression, so that you couldn’t tell if he was doing a really good job of containing a freak out or just legitimately unflustered or unbothered by the events of the preceding narrative — a narrative that would definitely have been jarring to any actually square person, with established protocols being ignored, authority and sensible rules flouted, things that were “just not a good idea” embraced with abandon, with laughter even….

When sales continued to plummet, the title was shelved and there arose a heated internal debate among the strip’s creators about how to resolve this essential ambiguity of the character for the final episode: was he essentially square but “holding it in” or had he actually learned something about resignation and letting things be and not caring about what Others think? Had the cool counsel of his slick sidekick and “black friend” Rick Warrior finally had its effect? Had he grown comfortable in his own skin at long last?

The unanimous decision was — he had a totally massive spastic meltdown, lasting from the very first frame to the very last in the book, in which he not only freaks out about everything that had occurred in every previous strip but freaks out about not having freaked out about it in real time, etc…. Tears, red in the face, knowing he could only blame himself, knowing he was to blame, him….! (And yet They, they..!) Freaked out about mortality, freaked out about politics, freaked out about never having “found myself, let alone a partner….” In a way, it really was the perfect end to the Non-Spherical Man strip, because now no one wanted to hear from him ever again.

Preferring sickness over health not per se but because there is another sickness which sickness undermines, but health supports — the sickness of your outlook, of your habits, of your life.

A music of multiple heavy work trucks backing up, their warning pulses falling into and out of syncopation.

One young woman to another on the street: “the problem with x is that she’s actually very very smart but she acts like she’s very very smart –“

Fallen tree branch: the line it described in the tree above is the same as the one it describes on the sidewalk below, only now it is a segmented line.

Fallen tree branch: Now instead of being in the air, it looks like a picture of itself in the air, with dark concrete serving as its background of sky.

Dog’s brow furrowing as he withdraws his head from the moving car’s opened window:  doesn’t want to bang his head.

Crow perched on streetlamp: the angle between the opening of his upper and lower mandibles is proportional to the angle closing between his head and talons each time he caws — and there are three such caws.

Guy coming downhill turns inward minutely his left shoulder — and I, going uphill, turn inward minutely my left shoulder — as we pass. If we had not turned our shoulders, our shoulders would not have touched.

Girl at bus stop blowing bubbles into orange drink with transparent bubble top lid (Now coughing a little: “it’s ‘gone down the wrong pipe.’”)

Had the pedestrian who’d been walking ahead of me turned right or left at this ‘T’ in the sidewalk? (I look twice in both directions and don’t see her.)

Surprising how sensitive my strained hamstring is to the slightest acclivity: my first step up the hill and I’m aware of it again. 

The small ripples in the puddle are from the rain drops. the large ripples in the puddle are from the raindrops that, having collected in an overhanging branch, fall as a single drop.

If I am a person who, despite all that is here, can see only the threat of insects. If I am a person who, despite all there is, can see only restaurants. If I am person who can see only women or see only women of a certain age with a certain figure or complexion. If I am person who sees only things of which I disapprove. If I am a person who, in despite of all there is, sees only concrete and cars here and signs here, because they are predominantly what’s manifested here. If I am a person who can’t see beyond his fixations. If I’m a person who can’t notice all there is without reference to what I may have to think or say about it. If I’m a person who’s learned to take a blind eye to himself, having a comfortable opinion of himself no matter what. If I am person who can’t look out of the eyes of another.

Lately that sense your life is not going anywhere (which is based on the true fact that it has really not gone anywhere) has been accompanied by the idea that you have been thinking that for a very long while now: that this is perhaps the ten thousandth iteration of that thought; that you’ve grown quite grey since you first had that thought; that your greyness may even be composed of such thoughts, a one to one ratio of the thoughts to the hairs…. None of the milestones of adulthood, no record of personal or professional attainment, never started a family, don’t really own anything. Your only real achievement, if it is an achievement, is still being here, and that isn’t an achievement so much, in your case, as it is an odd fact — or even, something that obtains in defiance of the facts, a Rasputin-type situation.

(In some sense, we suppose, you were repulsed by life’s milestones, so it makes sense you wouldn’t attain to them, though we don’t yet understand why you were repulsed.)

Looking at these pylons stretching far off to the left and right (a substation just visible beyond the crowd of autobody shops), The WO&D trail, the midpoint of your commute, it strikes you that you’ve passed this way “a thousand times” — when, in fact, you realize with a start, it has actually been more like ten thousand times! 10 THOUSAND TIMES you’ve passed the string of towering pylons and powerlines that are now in the landscape behind you. And what have you been doing this whole time? Your only possible logical response to this question is — that you’ve been writing this. You’ve been writing this is the only response.

Cheever called those “grass dividers” which I tend to call “medians.” I like “road verge” though I don’t naturally say that. “A Tail Twitch from The Road Verge,” could be a title of my book. (A squirrel tail, that I have just seen twitch, from the median, having indicated to me he has safely crossed.)

Something you don’t see: full iceberg lettuce head in the curb. (I immediately suspect the stone mason.)

Patter of someone packing their cigarettes (three sets of four pats), echoing out from the concrete of the gas station. 

Two sparrows sitting on the parking sign edge; no, it is one sparrow and one similarly-sized similarly-colored hob at the top of the sign pole, the former having just flown off. I experience a strange “bending of perception” and realize after a few steps that a lens of my glasses has popped out.

I reach a curve in the curbing just as the outflow from someone’s carwash reaches it, and follow the slow edge, through plastic, grit and sticks, to the sewer — childhood.

A woman’s bare neck and the black strap of her shirt over her shoulder as the storm door closes behind her.

No car, no cell-phone, no pet, no medicine or healthcare, no facebook page or social media profile, no social life, walk everywhere… you can’t really have what is called a life in such an affluent area while retaining that degree of simplicity, which requires more meeting your peers where they are — (“No I’m not Thoreau,” I can see myself thinking during that time, “but I have had time and simplicity, you couldn’t deny,” and I won’t display any acknowledgment yet of sensing what I’ve missed.)

Two drops from a shaken wet tree above me:  one that merely grazes my right arm’s hairs before continuing its descent; the other which strikes my arm but is so slight and insignificant a point of moisture that it leaves no mark — as if the effort to instill me with a sensation of itself had caused it to expire and be vanquished.

Oneself was a Gas Giant which, bereft of its vanity, would be as small as an atom, was my interpretation today of the Antonio Porchia remark that one must “get small in oneself.” I spent all my life like this giant sun, 5’8” or whatever, when I was in fact such a fraction of myself I could hardly detect it, just as the amount of time I was truly present in my fifty years could be counted in seconds. I thought that I was as tall as my height and these hands were mine to hold with, but once you decoct it all to pure substance there’s an atom or two rubbing together, this is all, and they have no arms.

A single use travel-size pouch of hand lotion on the pavement. A bug circling the dedicatory plaque on bridge. Man in posture to ride skateboard but feet level and stationary on concrete. Sparrows fighting each other, but the squirrel has turned his back.

And what did they say was the issue with idealism…? That one was not being honest about what one wanted. One had been thwarted in the things one most wanted and so created this alternate idea of a thing that was even better and greater than the thing one most wanted — an ideal. This alternate thing was better and grander than all the other things because it didn’t actually exist, and so didn’t need to conform to reality. And it didn’t feel like a loss that you never achieved your ideal because, again, it didn’t actually exist.

Is that all that they said? Well, they put forward Montaigne and the rest and they said that everything just works better when people act in their own interest and nothing works when you try and improve things for everyone else. And the real problem, they go on, are these people who haven’t figured out how to take care of themselves, of which you might be an example, although not an extreme case. Here you are, clamoring about climate change, for example, not that that’s an ideal, but you haven’t even figured out how to dress yourself properly. Learn to dress yourself, would say Montaigne to you probably.

And you respond? Self-interest should be tempered by idealism, which is having a regard for the whole, and idealism by self-interest, which is minding oneself. History is replete with examples, but most concretely to me in the Italian politics of the middle ages, of how much better the welfare of individuals would be if they could now and then cast an eye toward the welfare of the whole.

I see an unused paper towel flat on the street; I see a handwritten to-do list on the grass beside a picket fence, all its items crossed-off and completed; I hear the chirp of a robin which I notice is perfectly syncopated with the beat of two of my steps, then goes off the beat; I see a handicap accessible ramp with three loose stones in its pebble aggregate. If I had taken a step in the street just then, perhaps the driver would have slowed to let me pass; but since he didn’t in advance of me stepping into it, I not only don’t step into it, I step back from it… so now he stops and is trying to wave me on.

Hadn’t encountered this in a while: a customer with romantic ideas about coffee shop ownership yesterday. He’d had a concept once but couldn’t make the numbers work, he said. Yeah, I said, I think it’s more the sort of thing you would do as a hobby than for money. Or if you really had a passion, he said. No not even then I don’t think, I said. (Probably especially not then, I didn’t say.) Woman picking up things from off the ground on Cleveland. Looking down, I see here and there what seem to be playing cards, “magic” written on a side.

“Magic”: magic is how Homer tells the ten plus year story of the Trojan War in just a few weeks of it, really a couple days of it, so much more powerful than if he’d given us the history from beginning to end, so sophisticated three thousand years ago, more amazing than the pyramids. Magic is the spontaneity of Melville’s language in Moby Dick, how wildly he proceeds while always landing on his feet. Magic in the real world is the depth and freedom to be found in reading, writing, humor, and art.

A day that has been so beautiful one wishes not to admit what has become increasingly obvious about it — that as the sun has lowered it has become unpleasantly hot.

A long plastic slat in the busy intersection, rattling at each overpassing axle.

Passing a baseball team practice, a dad says of his son: “on game day, he gets in his uniform as soon as he wakes up.”

Cars turning into and out of these streets: black folks in and out of the historically black neighborhood. Worker who delivers recycling barrels — cleaning his boots now with rainwater from the ditch. Bridge construction: worker holding the active jackhammer horizontally into the bridge side, which must take great strength. Question: is the person I’d walked past at the bus stop five minutes ago visible on the bus that is just now passing? Answer: he is. Question: What is the man in the wide-brimmed hat doing on his knees? Answer: The man in the wide-brimmed hat is weeding an area of his lawn. And one more thing: what do you recall of the young mother who passed you on the bridge with her dog and her baby carriage? I recall that at the moment of our passing, her sneaker grazed the concrete and loudly chirped in a way you’d expect only on a more polished surface, the tennis shoe squeak of a basketball court.

Police car stopping at stop sign; car to its right stops at its stop sign; car to that car’s right comes also to a halt. Police car goes straight; car to its immediate right goes straight; car to that car’s right (driver watching the departing rear edge of the car that had been to its left) goes straight.

“Why not a ‘Knight of Faith’?” (Those were extremely special cases. Father Abraham, the Virgin Mary…) “Why not a ‘Knight of Faith’?” (I really should be capable, should really strive, to perform the absurd, by which I don’t mean of course, be absurd, which requires no striving, unless it is only by erroneously striving that one is made absurd. Being oneself might be being absurd.) “Why not a Knight of Faith’?” (If I were to disobey reason, I would do what people without reason do; I would not do what people with faith do. If I were to disobey reason, I would perform a crime and be unethical; I would fail within, not go beyond, ordinary ethical constraints). What do you speculate is the “still small voice?” “The still small voice” is the voice prior to all the other evolutionary voices, I speculate. “It is the voice that doesn’t evolve because it came into existence evolved, and is our essential and first voice. To evolve beyond it would be to become something else, not human.”

Children having scrawled their names in colored chalk on the preschool wall. I recall two of the four names — Nora and Calder. Something oddly evocative about the large colorful childishly written names, like an opposite to a grave stone — these personalities, ancient spirits, having slipped through The Vault and entered our world. Nora and Calder.

Q: Where is life not merely destroyed
but flattened so that there can be no doubt? [here]

Q: are cars “readers”, for whom stop signs are periods and yield signs are commas and asphalt and route varieties are varieties of text [no.] […] and garages, and car ports….? and are diacritics like nobs on airconditioners….? [no.]

Q: where had that phrase rolling around in you, as you envision this world on fire – “on fire with decay” – come from? [The phrase has come from the book Winesburg, Ohio.]

Boring things. The stump at the corner of WR &19th, for instance. One could imagine it being carved into something interesting, one could imagine it being carved into something even more boring. One could imagine attaching a small metal placard to it so you had to stoop to read what it said and it said “stump.” What quality does it share with other boring things? A Stop Sign is boring but shines out with its use. Things that are necessary are often individually boring yet interesting within a scheme.

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 you suspect human agency.” 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 shuns 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.

Opinion: in an earlier time this would have been the day the season turned. After that day of rain, brought on by a cold front, the cold would persist and the season would be Fall. But these days, it’s just hot again.

A car’s akilter license plate makes me think its parking is akilter, but its parking is not at all aslant: it is evenly parked between the parallel white lines.

I had noticed that the figure approaching was a woman — what kind of woman? (blond, young, with dog, “sorority girl”) Noticed the driver of the car was a man — what kind of man? (male, glasses, cap, frizzy hair)

Pushing my feet forward through an acorn strewn area, I hear a shell crack beneath every other step, or every other other step, or so. Yet when I pass through this area into one without fallen acorns, I continue to hear a crack but with every other step: it’s a shell that’s been wedged in my shoe treads

The sound of a nearby approaching car and the sound of an unseen approaching jet overlap each other so precisely that the car itself has the sound of a passing jet until the moment it passes me; then the jet sound eclipses absolutely every other sound, including those I myself make.

At the midpoint between the two cars travelling in parallel, side-by-side, the water splashes kicked up by their tires meet, which are picked up in turn by the head lamps of the cars behind them.

Castor of an office chair in small gulley of dried mud with pebbles between the sidewalk and curb.

The pen fell out of my pocket at the moment I broke into a run.

Four bikers in a row, I’m watching the spacing gradually and proportionately grow between them: the first moving away from the second the first quickest, the second moving away from the third the second quickest, etc.

My letter going into the blue U.S Postal Box: flashing out for the first time its importance at the moment it becomes irretrievable.

Who was the Over Person?

If the Superman was an incredible man then The Overman was an incredible weight upon the ordinary man, or person, so that they could not feel natural. The Overperson prevented the normal person from achieving his natural potential, sort of the opposite of a teacher. The ordinary man would have been a normal and natural person, but there had arisen this grave worried person instead, this person who “Overthought.” That would be the comic strip :  The Overperson Vs. Superman. In one version the Overperson wins, since Superman is overwhelmed with the idea of his inadequacy and sees kryptonite behind every bush. In the other version Superman is himself the Over person: and soundly defeats the regular people who admire him.

Trying to determine the ratio of that toy dog’s steps to those of his strolling human master, but I find it’s non simple and possibly irrational. Rhythmic pop of an aluminum can getting folded and folded back in my backpack as I walk with the recycling. A lunated sigma, a flattened Essencia water bottle. (The latter by my foot, an object on the street; the former in my mind — something I’d looked up.) In the car just passed, a member of the County Board. I have reached out for a falling leaf but it has settled instead on my upturned wrist. Molten flattened congealed rainedon kickedat buckled runover shredded cardboard box. A parked car with scratched rear bumper and discolored hood. Q: Were you to time everything that occurred in this book, what would be the total duration? 15 minutes? What would be our lifespan if we counted only those moments we truly “lived” or understood or in which we experienced urgency — or if we just subtracted our distractedness? Would it last so much as a day, our whole life? “Like returning body of Hector to Priam” I note — returning this empty plastic “body” to the recycling bin.

A moment of indecision, as if in slow motion, becomes one of no decision, as my head strikes the branch laden with water, then becomes one of belated decision, as I seek to avoid the very thing I’ve just struck.

 Missing the effects of my vaccination: for a few days I’d almost been, in the deepest sense, still, whereas I am now a whirlwind of plans, a whirlwind whose very purpose, designed by nature, extending down from the swirling sky like a finger, is to keep me just as I’ve been.

Child taking a nasty spill off her bike, dad running up behind her … And there is something odd about her terrible wailing; that she has turned it into a kind of song…. There she was howling in pain, but in the last “measure” of the howl, as it were, it became a sung note, so that I thought afterwards that that was how music first entered the world — it was a cry that became a note to stave off pain.

Was that all it was, had I “solved the problem” by seeing this: that on this walk I did not actually encounter things but encountered only my ideas and ideas of things, that I’ve actually encountered only my own mind this whole while? Riposte: : But in some sense I’ve encountered the mind of others also: this city, this county, indicates an immense multi-generational “mind of others.”

Spinoza-inspired idea that “I am the miraculous of God encountering the non-miraculous of God”: these both join up in myself without me knowing how.

Was that all it was, had I “solved the problem” by seeing this — that life wasn’t just short but actually instantaneous? That instant that just passed that I can’t even recall now — is what life is like.

Our paths have the appearance of converging: but while she is moving quickly around the concrete curvature of the bending sidewalk, I’m taking a shortcut over the grass. I’m walking the vegetal chord that subtends her concrete arc but much more slowly.

What is writing? I write something down, a thought, an observation — and it’s not that. I joke about what I’ve written, and it’s that.

Soggy playing card on concrete outside dog park. “Reflective white painted strips for pedestrian crossing are called zebra stripes and can be perilously slick when it rains.” “That was an impressively loud crack of an acorn on a car roof,” I say to myself. I raise my head to acknowledge the person I’m closely passing, a neighbor, but there is no need — their gaze is fixed straight forward. What is that emerging from the river mud? (Wheels of abandoned skateboard.) What is that beside the napping goose? (Brown empty beer bottle.)  Some irritation in the oxeter I think it’s called. Child, who is crying, is instructed to cross the crosswalk promptly. A sprinkler’s partial skirt of moisture folded over the driveway apron. Big muscular unattended dog who looks interested in leaping right over that fence. Diseased or injured squirrel: a red streak on its fur, a bald tumor on its head.

An itch: the feeling I am composed of many small downward pointing arrows or rays, and one of them around my midsection has become slightly bent, or two of them have become somewhat crossed, or entangled, and though my finger is so much larger than these entangled rays, it does easily and nimbly uncross them, moving back and forth over the spot and thus with light pressure relieving the itch.

Q: What is the advice you keep telling yourself but not following: do ego diminishing things like going to see medical professionals, don’t do ego enhancing things like reading the internet.

Q: Is reading Proust ego-enhancing (vanity of learning) or ego-diminishing (presence of genius)? now I’ve lost sight of what ego is

What seems a long wire is in fact a long twig: having fallen from the tree’s top branches it has been caught lower down in a vertical position. In a secluded area, a scene from The Odyssey: two fair-skinned young girls playing one-on-one basketball, a bronze-skinned homeless man on the nearby bench.

Writing strategy conceived: do absolutely everything you should do then hope you make a mistake.

(To be without all the voices of others in my head. It’s unthinkable, really. Might it one day be done? Would it make me ‘me’?)

My walk — three miles to work and three miles back, at least five days a week for over fifteen years — came to an unexpected end. My parents health got very shaky and I needed to move in with them, which meant I needed to start driving to work…. I’d never been married, never had kids, hardly dated, never had a serious job — aimless, innumerate, drank too much — I had avoided all things of importance, without being carefree — indeed I was very concerned — I was person who didn’t have a life, you might almost say — downwardly mobile yet genuinely well-meaning and polite.

“Same angular velocity”: as my head swiveled toward that woman across the street, that woman across the street raised her thermos to her mouth.

Man watering garden plants in same careless manner you’d hose anything down — mud from the sidewalk, soap off the car… a waving motion so lackadaisical its intent could be either circular or lateral; he sprays the lawn and perimeter fence as much as the garden.

Toddler walking in grass nearby. Though so small, he seems to walk like a giant, raising feet much higher than necessary.

Oddly tone-deaf Sherwin-Williams ad on truck side. It seems to enjoin us to “cover the world in paint” and portrays a globe being immersed in a paint can.

Looking away from staring at a stranger (middle-aged white woman putting stuff in the back of her parked car at the Quadruple A) to discover I am myself being stared at by a stranger (young Latino garbage man in full-on reflective gear, appearing out of “alley” of Quadruple A.)

Squirrel’s scrambling path describes trapezoidal pattern when I approach – each corner a reconsideration – then clambers up ornamental tree.

Rectangle of sky seen between the four tires of the ART bus as it crests the Walter Reed Hill. This now trapezoidal space of sky has suddenly emerged between its tires, but is almost as quickly occluded by the front of the bus, then the bus itself is concealed by the hill.

My head having already been turned to a greater than 90 degree angle – or so it feels with my eyes continuing to scroll – I must either stop my forward progression, or stop watching the tennis players.

What is the relationship between the stone garden gnome on the steps and the weeping willow in the yard? (Only willow on the route though not the only gnome.)

The only willow, the only seated garden gnome on the stairs, the only freestanding flagpole in the yard, its halyards causing something to repeatedly clank in the wind just now.

I notice that you tend to sniff when passing people on the street. I wonder, do you do this to get their attention for some reason, or to inform them of your presence?

No.  I think it has more to do with trying to avoid being seen with a runny nose. I think this especially because I sniffed just now while being passed by an automobile, and while I could not plausibly have been trying to attract the driver’s attention by this means, I might plausibly have been worried that they would see my nose run. Additionally, it would be an odd way to attract the positive notice of another person, wouldn’t it?… (Another possibility is that I sniff a lot at certain times of year and am only cognizant of it in the presence of other people, especially women.)

I notice that women walking dogs tend to talk to their pets as they pass you or as you pass them, do you feel that it is to attract your notice, and to make a demonstration of what nice, solicitous people they are?

No. I think women may in general be especially sensitive to the social awkwardness of two people being in close physical proximity without acknowledging each other, and try to obviate or mollify it by talking to their pet. It is also possible that people, especially lonely people, will talk to their pets quite a lot.

Funny thing — just as I am concluding these thoughts, I hear a sniff. It is a young woman approaching me, athletic type. She looks briefly over to me while we pass and, judging by her expression, I would guess that she’d like to kill me — a look of total hostility.

Opening bars of Parliament’s Flashlight heard behind me. Car quickly crosses Walter Reed from Pollard at start of verse. Before I can mentally humm “Three Little Birds” they’re gone.

That ambulance, as it passes you, bleats in a regular fashion, but further down, the siren echoing, it begins to sound out of time with itself. Now looking at my Iron Man Watch and recalling Faulkner’s phrase that a watch was “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.” I thought that what he meant by this was that only those who are mortal, and who thus have finite time, as represented by the watch, can have an attachment to the world, and thus also have desire for and hope with respect to it. (One was old, and you kind of new what that meant now — but what was the etymology of Time?)

But anyway, for about fifteen years I walked my three miles to the coffee shop and back; for over twenty years I worked at the shop; but for over thirty years, wherever I was, and whatever I was doing there, I had tried — (without necessarily thinking I was a writer, in fact definitely not thinking that, thinking even that I was not that) — to “write something” — which I didn’t even know what that meant necessarily, to “write something,” but I believed I could do it given enough time and application.

So I gave what I must imagine were the best years of my life to this task, or I tried to, or I told myself that’s what I was doing, and I must report that I have basically achieved nothing in all that time, (unless you should be good enough as to consider this to be something, which maybe there is some grounds for believing.)

In any case, I achieved so extremely little over so long a time, I have come to conclude this has been a sort of misplaced love I had, very much akin to Swann’s for Odette, if you’re familiar. Literature was a surrogate for life, an excuse for not having life, a false door to life, to which I say finally — or I try to — God bless it.