Lost Pages

I spend most holidays alone. People usually have plans involving family and fixed routines; besides I don't like to drink and drive, so my tendency is to stay home. Well stocked with booze and tobacco, I stopped at the library yesterday for another Thomas Perry novel and a book of essays on pre-historic art. Hot early on the fourth of July, no breeze; sitting still, reading beneath a ceiling fan, I stick to my chair. Full summer like this, I keep several sleeveless tee-shirts draped over chairs, changing often during the day, for one that's dry. Thinking back over the great many serious and witty conversations of the last week, dozens of them, touching on a hundred subjects, bifurcating in ten thousand directions. Talking about "Moby Dick" and "Clarel", the non-virginal Emily, wind-power and oil spills, the way the past is remembered, new authors we had variously discovered, the price of tea in China (really), cooking, graduate school, Janitor College, gullibility, compatibility, when (if ever) it was proper to intervene. More questions than answers. None of that arrogance from when we were younger, and knew everything. Now we know we know nothing and everything is flux. I was ready for this, I had an optopicon, through which I could view the world, all the lines of convergence came into focus. I said little and listened. A thousand fictions I could write, bottom line is that everyone is defending something, a small section of turf. I'm low-tech, holding a hand-held sextant, rather than a GPS; I still know, more or less, where I am. Sometimes there's not an exact correlation, things are merely what they are. A rock in the road, water over the damn. Fireworks are an odd celebration, an imitation of neurons firing. John Phillips Sousa. The band-shell. Be careful what you believe. That odd glow on the horizon, no sound, except for an impacted bass note, long after the fact. One thing we might associate with another. Too much time in the wasteland. No assumptions. Half a moon is better than none. I can almost see. The dog must have smelled something or heard something or maybe just imagined a situation where it was necessary to bark, a bad dream or a bear in the compost pile. John Prine, Greg Brown. It's a last resort to look for justice. An old blues song, everything you had is going south, the train, your ex-wife, even, by god, your dog. Get used to it. Loss is a matter of course. Everything is always moving away from you, you changed the tune, a red shift. Dopler. A Modified Chevron seemed a reasonable response. It might not be enough. The world is moving way to fast.