I had the Bluetooth in my ear because I had been on the phone with my parents and then on the phone with my daughter, the nature girl. Nature girl was doing nature stuff when I called even though it was still early morning. Something to do with rabbits and computers. She is like me and has some trouble talking on the phone, so I kept up a line of babble for both of us. That is how I imagined it. I have not talked with her in a while so it is easy to come up with new babble.

I find it easy to babble with my parents. The thought that it is difficult is not an accurate perception. My father comes on the phone and I tell him about the new planer joiner I bought at a garage sale for twenty bucks. He tells me the story of the first planer joiner he had. I remember the story. But I don't say this to him. I also remember the planer joiner and I remember how it would chew through a piece of wood and the smack of the guard against the fence after the newly cleaned wood cleared.

My jaw and neck are still swollen from the infection I got from a cracked tooth last week. The tooth has been pulled but the knot under my neck remains. The knot laughs at antibiotics. I look out into the yard and am pulled back into some memory of childhood where I first determined that the world was a dangerous place. The only cure for this perception is to understand what danger is and realize there are limits to the amount of death that can be imposed while the pain that can be imposed on the living has no limits.

I'm sitting here waiting for you because you have the ability to actually de-rail this train of thoughts and relieve pain to some extent. As I wring my hands I am conscious of the finger nails and how they are hard and sharp like those nails of small animal, scrabbling inside my hands and trying to get out. It is not always that you will tell me to take the Ativan, which I have already done, but in talking to you at some point I will become embarrassed at my posture and I will initiate activity to occupy my mind

I woke up this morning from a nightmare where my power tools were coming up the stairs to get me. The radial arm saw was cawing its way up the stairs and the planer joiner bounded behind it in little puppy leaps. The radial arm was hungry for my arm and before I could bind it with my belt it had me down on the table, the bright ten-inch blade whining toward my head and I screamed into the bright blade noticing just before the teeth tore into my skull the harmonic intertwining of the blade whine and my scream.

I bicycle the path around the lake every day. You would think it would get repetitious but there is this amazing variation in the angle of the sun. There is Variation in what I can remember from the previous circuit. How long before I memorize this path? It is going to change again before I can remember a significant amount of it. Even the buildings and the lake itself are constantly changing. It is startling. It is frightening.

I am filling up the page with

white

space

asfastasicango.

Running I am trying to

keep ahead of the 5ive thousand pound

roll come loose and hollering after me



It is like this

unto that

oh I ache for the inkblot that will

free me

that will undo my tortured legs.



It seems there are notes

on the piano that will say what I want

but it is just as difficult to let them

loose.



Until then there is only sound, the multiplicity of sound and the

strange ability of any one person to hear

all of them at once.

One of the pair of speakers I am selling is a pair of DCM Time Window 3's. I have seen these offered for anywhere from $400 to $800 bucks despite the fact that they are probably thirty years old. My pair is a little rough because I lent them to my daughter for a few years and she had a lot of dogs. They consequently have a lot of snags in the cloth covering. They don't photograph well either. That is a problem with Time Windows in general. They sound great and look ok, but they do not photograph well.

I didn't go bicycling today. I have been doing it a lot, but I was not up for it today. Also it looked like rain today. Not only did it look like rain, but it also actually did rain. Note the "not only...but also" construction. I taught English for a couple years as a TF, so I learned the basics pretty well. Unfortunately, over the years I have forgotten much of what I learned. What's worse, the rules have changed.. They put out a new edition of the grammars every year. How are you supposed to keep up with that?

I didn't go bicycling today. I have been doing it a lot, but I was not up for it today. To celebrate my 65th birthday, in fact, I bicycled 20 miles. It was sort of a goal I had. On my way home from the big ride I stopped at a garage sale where I met a woman who biked in the same area I did. She told me about her brother who rode in 100-mile events and who had a $10,000 bicycle. She also mentioned her time for my circuit which was about fifteen minutes faster than mine was.

Yes, I know I have done this before, but I have fifteen minutes left to write here. Fifteen minutes is more than enough to write a hundred words if I do not dally. Not even ten seconds have passed and I am at forty words. Isn't it interesting that there is a "u" in the word "four" but not in the word "forty?" I'll bet there is a good reason for that, but I shall dwell in ignorance rather than look it up. Thirteen minutes left and I am nearly finished. It looks like I will have time for another hundred.

Twelve minutes left to do 100 words. Can I do it? Of course I can. I write much more quickly than I bicycle. It also helps that I type fast. I can almost do 100 words in one minute if I do not have to make them up as I go. Eleven minutes to go and I am halfway there. I have not even bothered to look out the window where it has been raining much of the day. Ten and one-half minutes and I can see the end just over the next line. This hasn't been difficult at all.

I'm sorry. I am having a difficult present. I was up pretty late and was unable to sleep. I spent some of the night with TED happiness videos and some of the morning also. I don't remember who I listened to. I don't pay attention to people's names and cannot remember them anyway. Or is it that I cannot remember people's names and...or because...the language is so loose that way. I didn't see any prescriptive material there. Although I believe one speaker was talking about memory vs. on-going experience. It seems to me there is more than one memory-like state.

Some of the studies I read about on the net are interesting. I saw one yesterday that implied that people are happier with their choices if they view them as permanent and they feel they have no chance of changing their minds. No buyer's remorse allowed. You are committed to an activity with no hope of backing out. There isn't room for second thoughts. The implication seems to be that second-guessing yourself is not so good for you. I am always worried that I am making bad life-choices. What if bicycling or reading a book is a bad life choice?

The bottom blew out of the compressor in your garage today. I can see it, the round steel bottom twisted in on itself and inside out. I imagine it sitting in your garage for perhaps decades, clicking on and off, faithfully maintaining a steady pressure, perhaps with no one even aware it was still working. You might have even gotten used to the sound of its cycling, paying no attention to the gasp and rumble when it came on. I suppose the pressure causes the moisture to condense, causes the steel to rust. That is what my father taught me.

The day is heavy with moisture, heavy with pre-winter foliage and dragonflies landing to bend tall trees beneath their weight. It is my birthday, yet another day, and I am uncharacteristically not thinking of me. Perhaps I think of you because thinking of you is thinking about me and I do not understand why certain moments of my life stand out like pictures nailed onto the wall, but there you are, standing in your mother's kitchen. The light is coming through the window and you seem to be thinking. Maybe you will look up. Maybe I will catch your eye.

It is a day like any other. The fuzz and whine have collared the dog, vanishing over the hill like so many words scraped from a slightly damp wooden wall. The paint is chipping, peeling and in places where it is thick it has those alligator checks with cracks that run deep like rivers on a map, maybe one of those bumpy globes where you can feel the mountains with your fingers, slippery over the ink, slippery over the ink. The day is heavy with moisture, heavy with pre-winter foliage and dragonflies landing to bend tall trees beneath their weight.

My timer is down to 20 minutes, so I hurry up and take the Ativan. This way I will know exactly when it takes affect. It is not your fault I am crumbling so badly. It is the music I am listening to. It is something someone else said to me. I am being run over by a 500-mile ribbon of highway to you and it won't stop coming. There are times I can do things to make it go away, but the awkward truth is that I don't want it to go away. It is my keepsake from you.

My music streamer has become all skippy and I think the neighbors are growing poppies. I am anticipating a wave of ease here. The muscles are loosening around my eyes. This morning I had planned on taking a nap too, but I have no idea what happened to that plan. It is not that the craving for it has gone away. Maybe I have been rudely danced upon, or the veins and arteries to my heart have been tied into sloppy little knots. I can smell the sky. I can see the pine needles prodding the light that surrounds them.

My stomach is upset. Possibly because I ate at the Coney. I took Michael Jr. and Lilly with me. I hadn't been there for maybe 7 months and all the waitresses were new. Maybe I just showed up at a different time. The food was disappointing too. Junior ordered a plate of Nachos Supreme that was positively depressing. That is a possible reason I have been eating at other places. I had a longing for scones the other day and bought some at Meijer. They were not what I was longing for. I need to make some of my own.

I put some speakers on Craig's list a couple of weeks ago. I had three or four pair depending on how you count. I might even have more. I forgot and put them on the Ann Arbor Craig's list and I have not sold them yet. What I forgot was that things sell better on the Detroit Craig's list. Perhaps there is a larger audience. I did find a lot of things I wanted to buy though. Oh, do I spend the money? Do I take the time to drive to Plymouth? These are the questions that try my soul.

Am I happier with a cleaner carpet? Well yes think I am. It affects the everyday ambience of my life and a dirty carpet is a constant reminder that the carpet is not clean. It requires an effort to overlook it. So, am I happy while cleaning the carpet? Again the answer is yes. It is a thing I am fairly good at. It is actually a small physical challenge. I don't think I want to spend my life cleaning the carpet, but done occasionally it is a positive thing. Possibly the begged question here is does happiness really matter?

I hope I never lose the capacity to feel joy while listening to music. I should not worry. Given that I have had this habit for as long as I can remember I am likely to not do anything but perfect it in the future. I remember even while I was six or seven laying on my parent's couch with a tube Bakelite radio at the end, just enjoying the sounds that came out of it. Later I found a Victrola in a storage shed with a huge stack of records. Then came my first transistor radio, a Christmas present.

When rivers on the moon chime

in crooked admonition

when the last teaked-out sailor has

left for his last home behind a spinnaker sky.



When sandy hills like endless shapes of pebbles

wear their way deep into that crescent home,

When possibility bleeds dark blue through light.



When your heart leaps into that fierce flutter

when a thousand birds take flight

feathers pressing against the wind

and when rivers chime

small intricate glass cubes bumping

chipped edges against lunar bells.



When rivers on the moon run out over the edge

dumping foamy into a startled sky

Flaming stars

whispering night.

Dropping seeds

not caring how fertile the ground.

I am just

scattering handfuls in the mud,

in coffee cans,

on the highways, sidewalks,

out back and in town.



Braiding words into your hair

putting them like putty into your eyes and

in your mouth.



Yes, I am writing them small on

wafers

placed each tongue,

You

shall

eat

this.



Like strikes of electricity

flame shooting out your hair

scorching your clothes.



I am waiting

as the sun falls down through the trees

to see what new things this means



already in the morning dew

new shoots are crowding older leaves.

Well, yes I am moving slowly. This is probably why I feel I have so little time to do things. I had thought had an opportunity.. My son is going camping for three days. Three days to myself! I can get stuff done!. But it occurs to me that while this may make a significant change to the ambience of my home, it is not going to make that much difference to me. Perhaps there will be less angst. We will see. I rather imagine it will continue to be as much as I make it, as it always is.

I did the bicycle thing again today. I rode twelve miles and the first ten I did in an hour. That is not so much for a serious cyclist, but it was a kind of personal milestone for me. I have been having mixed feelings about the cycling. On the one hand I do feel better physically since I started. On the other hand, I have not lost much weight. My doctor assures me however that if I keep it up the weight will start coming off. He did award me today by taking me off his diabetes watch list.

I finished my 100-word entry for today, and then I erased it. I just didn't like it. It isn't that I had become picky about my entries. I obviously have not. I like the partial anonymity I have here and the freedom it gives me to write whatever I feel like, even if it is to re-write the same entry a different way 30 times for a month, or to write a hundred entries on the same subject. I don't think I have gone the repeat-the-same-word-a-hundred-times route yet, but I have been doing this a long time. So it's possible.

This is clearly a new place What we have here is a deep vein of nonrenewable resource where in the past we have found the best things. While we wait. While we wait for inspiration, for enlightenment while we wait even for sleep brightly decorated faries and other phantasms frolic around the bed. These are the best hours and this is the best use of such opportunities. We have made correct decisions. We will continue to elevate and to praise life, to crawl about the floor. Yes we will wonder about the decorations on the little hats they give us and we will take issue with anyone who comes within shouting.

Yes we are the best. The green grease is winning Lapping on the waves, the caps shining under the moon. She will be here soon. Maybe she comes in the night. Maybe she hides in the closet. Maybe she doesn't exist at all. We do not know what we cannot know and it seems to me that to name a thing is to circumscribe it in a cruel wayy, to take away the very essence. It is to make it like anything else capturing, surrounding it, drawing a blue chalk barbed circle around the thing. But I have other plans.

I do want to remember living in the computer living in the cyber world. I lay in the darkness, scratch my balls and the real world rolls on without me. I pitch staccato globs of, random paint up against a black canvas but I don't need light for this. I don't need wisdom. I don't need power. I don't need the legends touch. Oh you are so crafty with the word dance. But you will still have to use words. What are these words? Where have they come from? Who is the man sitting in the chair by my bed?