(as told by the 90s). Goodbye childhood, so to speak. I do a little wave, a very short one, but in the manner of a pageant
queen, as I hop into the trolley to read while moving uphill for a bit. This would generally be a good way to miss my stop, but I’ve been
reading this extra large novel for so long I know how many pages to the fraction that I can read between taking a seat (when there’s actually one available)
and when the trolley arrives at the top of Nob Hill, which is two blocks downhill from home.
a Vitamin Water left in the sink. I’m misreading my own scribbles again. I believe I wrote done rather than gone, as in, perhaps, finally clean. Gone would come later. The bottle is smack dab
in the middle of the sink. I cannot regurgitate the image. Did I once drink Vitamin Water regularly? Is that a Southern thing? the Marvel asks about the phrase smack dab in the middle of. I suppose,
I reply, always turned upside down a bit by the inappropriate words. Southern for where I’m from, as told by the man who lives below the actual Southern Hemisphere. A quick calculation of how
diane, thank you again for the long text message up
date. i know i gave you the brief skinny with what’s
going on with me, but i am always realizing how little
time i give to our correspondence, so in an effort to put, well, a small but hopefully significant time more, i’m writing you a poem-text. or somesuch. first, i’ll start with where you started, how ‘time has evaporated this month’ – by which you mean the month has been vap orized by time? or this month, compared with other months, has seen your time evaporate? i like the idea of time evaporating – i want to connect that to memory (or my lack of much of one) in some way. i could say my memory evaporates, unless i take the time (which might also be evaporating) to write things down or photograph them. there are large swaths of time that simply have not existed for me (well, the did actually exist, i think?), due to the fact that i could not afford a camera at the time (they weren’t ubiquitously inside of our phones, which i could certainly never have afforded during these stretches, either, i must say) while, simultaneously, I’d be going through that same duration
without notating a thing in writing, in what i called a journal – i had a couple dozen of these journals before losing them, and all of everything i physically had kept with me from the years, sometime shortly after i turned fifty, about two-thirds of a year after i was evicted from my pine street apartment, became ‘homeless’ – as they say. i used those journals to make the bulk of the pieces in this project,
which are even still accumulating, even after losing all of the
original notebooks and binders with which i had written whatever at the time seemed important to record in such a way – so that i might recall my history. not for the memory alone, of course. and much of what i recorded in
so-called diaries were penned with ink into words that,
together, surely sounded as if coming directly from the dark
lake of some tortured soul. anyway. so. time. a lot of which
has now passed since i began writing this note. and i’ve yet to
even ask but a couple of questions (did the month evaporate
or was it time that evaporated? – and how was this significant
or different from normal?). directly after this first thought, you mention how you feel as if you’ve been ‘going and going’ without having ‘much to show for it.’ boy, do i ever know that feeling, which is maybe another reason i make these little hodge-podges. have turned them into a ‘project’ (oh how i used to hate that word) the publication of which is something i can do myself, fairly easily, and have added to these the photographs and also, now, the videos of each. there are over four thousand seven hundred of these now. that’s a heap of things i can at any time point to and say (most always to my self) i did this. this is mine, something of me, which i leave for whomever. but, i guess in the end, it’s especially for me, so that
i might have something to show that i’ve accomplished (i’m always lousy at articulating what i’ve accomplished in almost any other context) and this broadens my life (extends time, even – or i’d like to say that; because i do believe it!), allowing me to recapture so many moments i’ve experienced. in order to remind me that i’ve been doing things. in order to assess and imagine how i might do better. doing things. remembering. keeping time as stretched out as possible. so. that covers i think the first two lines of your long note. and now i have a meeting i need to attend in a few minutes so, i shall end this long text in response to perhaps the least substantive part of your lovely text to me of, what, several days ago. see? sigh. i just did this. more soon? -del
I just thought of you, you see, as indeed I do several million times a day. I need your disapproval, can’t live without your churlish ways. —John Ashbery (from ”Homecoming”)
I like that I’m not like this. I could add some winks or a few hahas. But isn’t it true?
Who or what do I think of several million times a day. They say my mind is faster than most (this as a way to describe a malady, pressured speech), so perhaps there are things I think of several million times a day. But are
they you? Or this or that or you? I dare not say. When what I meant to say was a dare say not. Either way, what of it? You mean the world to me. Just as you (way over who knows where) used to. So what would be weird about that?
I’ve been watching this show which is fictional. It’s about a group’s chosen friends. How they choose to live in the same gigantic house. Or is it a hotel? Either way, it’s a choice they each make, as they each live in this house or hotel.
There was a little boy who liked so little about the place in which he was lucky to be born and exist. And in which he
grew up and up and, well, left. How does one like and yet not like a family? Perhaps he simply did not like them. This story, while getting older, is still too fresh to know.
And once a man he went about the task of building. Unlike his father before him, he was not a builder of furniture, not a painter of houses, not a person who laid down any law, or saw to it that they were upheld.
Instead, he slowly—and I mean ever so slowly—gathered people. His people. They were not to live under the same roof, no. But they were often there, under the same roof as he. And this satisfied the man to no end.
