I spent the day moving between buildings where people are trying to figure out to get things done, and headed home with the welcome distraction of music suggested by a coworker, and neighborhood callouts during my drive from a place that isn’t so much a building as it is an archive or a emergent space.
I think I’m still young and waiting around to get old, and then the streets and the businesses tell me to get off their lawns, and my coworkers tell me what musicians they’re listening to, and I get prompts reminding me of what I was doing on such and such a day, and I hardly know what year it is and which end is up, only that I’m happy to have the city, the job, the moment and the company while it lasts.
Words find residence and resonance, encountered, forgotten, reminded, astounded. You can think of a hundred things that would be safer to handle with vulnerable containers like mouths, eyes and brains than arrangements of letters, sounds or phonemes, and that’s before you get into pictures.
An all cylinder day, even with a bit of rain coming down every other half hour, and the light felt oddly flat in between either heavy cloud cover or just lost in swaths of rain drifting or hurtling down from above.
The roadway was lost against a field of late afternoon gray, bathed in waves of rain and chopped up spray from windblown vapor. If the car was going to veer out of its lane and into trouble, it should’ve gone and done it. But I got out and off the interstate and then home, and tomorrow I’m back at it.
After dropping off and returning a couple of books, I managed to pick up pictures from a drugstore after printing a particular form. Then came an inadvertent tour of a few post office facilities before I found one that would let me handle my business. Now, I wait for several weeks and see if everything falls just right.
Today was about blades and decisions, starting with the fill up of the gas tank and the trip over to the local hardware store and the decision against the multi-tool and the plan to visit the hardware store that led to a replacement of a knife I’ve missed for several months and the purchase of a screwdriver to install kitchen shelves.
It’s been one of those stretches where ten days feels like a few months, in part because of things feeding back on themselves, like how I’ve been spending those last few months, and in part from things exploding and imploding. Let’s see if a day or two, or some sleep, changes things, or feels like a half week’s rest or not.
Bad weather to go tooling around after people, but good weather to see the city anew from its watery edges. It was the third Wednesday in a row that I’d gone to a certain shop before my shift started.
It’s not that I haven’t been looking out the window recently. It’s just that I’ve been spending time looking out other windows at the place, or between other places in a vehicle or other vehicles? All of that too when I haven’t been looking at a screen, and all of that in addition to seeing.
