Reasons for being cold

I type tonight to pass the time. I'm waiting for later. I don't know what I'll be doing later. It just won't be now. My wrist hurts. Not as much as before but still there's some pain. My nails are too long. They are cracking and pitted on some of my digits. My lips are chapped and my scalp has an itch. It's cold inside. Maybe colder in here than out there, though, I'm still not sure how that's possible. Maybe it's the wood floors, or the uncovered window panes that make it seem like tundra conditions in my kitchen. I sit on the toilet and yelp. Cold seat on my seat. Still, there are colder places I could be. I keep my fingers moving on the keyboard. Circulation. If they sopt moving they might shrivelup into balls and then where'd we be? I can't feel my toes. I have socks on--not even cotton--and dry shoes. They aren't on feet that are walking, though, and that might have something to do with it. Again, circulation. Still, where would I go? I walk up and down stairs to move and to stay in the house. If I leave I'll be colder, I think. I'll want to walk to the Ship. I'll order neat whiskey, well and a beer. I'll drink and want to go home but won't want to as well. Instead I'll sit here tonight exercising my fingers. Sipping red wine. Laundry.

Rising from the ashes

 

I lay there neither awake nor asleep

A laptop computer can make quite a racket. After an hour of, say, idle time the laptop computer prepares itself for sleep. There’s a tiny fan that spins, and the laptop computer’s screen lights up. Little green lights blink as the computer quests for hibernation.

Before going to sleep I’m awake. Tired I start reading, I’m not tired enough to fall asleep on my own. I read for a while and my eyes became too heavy for the next paragraph. I turn off the reading lamp. Still not asleep, not awake, my mind continues reading the story. My eyes are shut, but sentences form as the novel goes on. I’m back in the book with next paragraph to make sense of. I’m flooded with words, dialog and detail. It's different.

If I turn the reading lamp back on to bring the laptop computer out of standby, I know outcome will not be the scene I’d seen (not read). The thoughts I just lost cannot be recorded and saved on the screen when I wake up.

I stop not reading and begin dreaming. In my dream I invent a way to connect my laptop computer to my subconscious. I want these thoughts to be there when I wake up like I typed them to sound true. My eyes are closed and I’m unable to write it down. An hour of idle time the computer turns itself to sleep mode.

Volunteers, amateurs, call them what you will...

At the park today

"Did you see the ferrets?" the old woman at the park asked me looking back from the path she was walking on.

"I did."

"What did you dog think of them?"

Heidi is still on the leash I haven't removed it for fear of her chasing the ferrets which I saw when I entered the park. Also, I don't want Heidi jumping on this old woman who later tells me about her knee replacements and an old ski injury. "I didn't let her meet them."

"Oh, I had never seen a ferret before."

"No? But you recognized that they were ferrets."

"They told me. I asked." The friendly woman said.

Ferrets kind of scare me if you want to know the truth. I had one when I was younger. For a few days. I had to return it because we didn't understand each other. I knew it was a ferret, I mean, but I didn't know what to do with a ferret. It, conversely did nothing for me.

"What kind of dog is that?" isn't just the most common question I get walking Heidi but the one the old woman asked.

"Well, she's an Austrailian Shepard, Corgi mix." Is the best and most friendly answer I give to anyone and this woman.

"Ah, she has beautiful, intense eyes."

I've just heard that from a man at the school, next to the park. A man who paused right before the last word in the sentance. The two sentences he spoke to me.

That's a great (pause) eyes.

and

Have a nice (pause) night.

As if he was going to change what he wished me well at the last moment.

Walking with the woman I can't help to think of my grandmother, who is at home. We'd talk like this, sharing everything we could think of. I'm in no hurry to get rid of this company I'm with. And I think she enjoys it, too. "Have you lived by this park for a while?" I ask because I'm curious of this park I recently moved near.

"I used to live in an apartment near Reed, now I live over in Sleepy Hollow," she said or said some other apartment complex by name I wasn't familiar with. "I walk my neighbor's dog here every morning. I take her out because she lays in bed all day."

"Well that's nice of you to do," I said. "It's probably good for both of you."

It's nice to have for me to have an excuse to get up and out of the house to daily. This is the only time I've left the house this day. And not having the excuse to walk the dog I don't know if I would have at all, wouldn't be having this conversation that feels reminiscent of ones I've had with Grandma.

We walk on. "It's good for me to walk. I've had knee replacement, both knees, and I'm battling and dealing with an old ski injury," she told me. In high school the old woman skied at Timberline when it first opened. She loved it but broke her leg. After she recovered from that she started running with the men in her office (I didn't ask but was curious as to what she did) and that's how she wore her knees out.

"I'm going to walk this was," the woman said when we got to a bend at the top of the hill."

"OK, it was nice meeting you." I'm I'm left with Heidi to wonder if even though we didn't exchange names--just a couple of war stories--we did meet and it was nice.

Down and Out in Beijing

I joined the Olympics as a spectator. I caught what became a Fever. Soon, implanted in my head: BOM-BOM, BOM-BOM. Yes, I felt Phelps phenomenon. I was gay for Gay. Kobe, LeBron, together, No way.

I’ll watch what I can, I said, but then I felt nauseous, so I flushed with fluids . My fever lasted only a little longer than the 100 meter dash (9.96 seconds – Lighting Bolt!)

And just as quick as I got it, my fever is gone.

I became disappointed that the most exciting thing about these Summer Games was the achievement of a swimmer savant receiving more medals in one Games than anyone ever has—we won’t mention your DUI as long as you don’t mention anything larger in context to what it is you do: swim, down and back.

I realized, too, feverous in my obsession, I was like all other Americans, watching only Americans. We almost forget to realize that there are other countries in these Games, that there are other countries in this World. We’ve forgotten that there are other People living in other Places. We care only to broadcast U.S. The only colors we wish to watch on T.V. are red, white, and blue. And the only sports that we can watch are those that capture our attention in the time span of a few lengths of the pool. Further, the ones we dominate.

When I walked in on Bob Costas, Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz tri-copulating was I cured once and for all of my Olympic Fever. Gone was the sweltering inner temperature. No longer did my head pound the anthem BOM-BOM, BOM-BOM. I was done with these Games before they were over. I finished first.

Final Bolano - 2666

I read Bolano all the way up and down the Max line and bus lines—from home to work in time to get in by 8 and leave by 12; back down to a little café to eat a brunch of organic beef and eggs and to sit reading hunched over a little 2-top squeezed next to the kitchen, tapping my right foot as if it’s possessed and holding my head with both hands; back on the Max to home to pick up a forgotten item for the journey and then back downtown (I have to stow the book while I walk from the Max stop to the Union Station); then on to the north bound train where I commence to read halfway to Seattle with a brief pause to look out the window at a stop just north of Vancouver, Washington where a scrap processing plant sprawls, heaped with old car parts; wanting to take a picture but not wanting it enough, or in time, to get out the camera; making a quick note about the perspective of 2666.

It’s deep into the part about Archimboldi and I’m at turns floored, without suitable access to reference material (at times despairingly so), just lost, and throughout it all slightly awestruck. We obviously learn more about Archimboldi than do the reconditionally endowed scholars in section 1. Infinitely more. We go deep into the Reiter’s past and into the pasts’ of his literary touchmates and into the past revolutions that inspired and then ensnared or ensnarled or enshrined them. We go so deep that we marvel, or grit through, those passages that we can’t always bear to follow, but nonetheless keep hold of the wire and respect Bolano all the more for having inspired us to do so.

We meet up with Fercho, a Colombian cousin accompanied by his California fiancé Karen, and go to dine and then to spend the night at their cozy apartment. He’s a mad scientist sort who’s just taken his doctorate studying electromagnetic fields of marine organisms, and his newly promised who has just begun her PHd in Electrical Engineering. Her Spanish is improving less rapidly than his English. He raves about some Colombian dark chocolate we buy at an Asian grocery and she about the fresh caught Tuna salad for dinner.
We breakfast on arepas con mantequilla y queso con café bien hecho y jugo de naranja. On our way out we stop by Pike’s Place market and the Seattle Art Museum, which we rush through on a lucky free Thursday.

We take a bus across to the Canadian border. There is a delay with some spacey guy with the wrong documents who for a minute or so tries to pretend he’s deaf but than gives up the ruse in the face of the stern Canadian border guardswomen. I learn this after almost two hours via the bus gossip. During most of it I’m on the curb racing through revelation after revelation in the book. Then we are back on the bus and across the border into Canada, and pulling into the station as the final section of 2666 pulls the narratives together but not definitively so; or rather, in such manner that one—despite the length and intensity of the book—is half-tempted to pick it up and start all over again, but this time at the beginning of a randomly different section, to examine it a different way, aided or hindered by the previously unknown.