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Elaborate Condensation

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