Iteration

I see myself on other people's screens, can't help but notice, these people are reading me. I'm just a janitor but I'm ok. Sara called with a janitor story that made the news, an immigrant that didn't speak English, got a job at Columbia University, night shift, and eventually a degree, in Classics. D got his MFA, thank god that's over, and is very tired. Being physically exhausted is a part, it seems, of the process. Any given week, a couple of days, I'm exhausted, when I can't sleep, and get up to write a couple of more lines, and that leads to several hours of serious contemplation about the human condition. Not that I expect a degree. At a certain point, nothing matters. Boone Coleman died, he owned most of the fertile bottoms in this area of the floodplain, and his heirs, all rich, don't see the need to work so hard. Some of the soybean fields are laying fallow. Which is cool, laying fallow. Especially in this one case, where an entire field, it must be twenty acres, is gone to wild mustard. You'd have to see this to believe it. The background, what you can see of it, is dark green (spring, the word green doesn't mean much) and the flush of yellow blossoms is off the scale. Really off the scale. Yellow to the tenth degree. It's a flood, an overwhelming avalanche. Not unlike that first acid sunrise. I just remembered that. I was on Cape Cod and someone, I don't remember who, sent me a drug that wasn't illegal at the time, and the sunrise, over the bay, was spectacular. Yellow is not my favorite color, blue is, but an entire field of yellow is something else.