how to get past the uselessness? the pointlessness? remember, it’s not the whole thing that’s pointless. some of it might be. that *that* might be might be different now from how it used to be. if your character remains too perfect or too precious, the whole thing is dead in the water. she meets up with her old prof who she’s since realized was often pompous and snotty. she tells him about her life, expecting scorn or condescension. to her surprise, she gets enthusiastic approval. i always knew you had something special in you, he said. well—why didn’t you ever tell me that at the time? she asked. because i wasn’t a very good teacher. Now can I buy you a coffee? > I dont think it makes no diffrents where you start the telling of a thing. You never know where it begun realy. No moren you know where you begun your oan self. > -- Riddley Walker 1. lose the gut 2. *show up* someplace where people are and be visible *and listen* and ask questions 3. do [something](https://medium.freecodecamp.com/inside-the-invisible-war-for-the-open-internet-dd31a29a3f08) about net neutrality and freedom of communication, human dignity, and “permissionless innovation” She’d started crying when she said, “I love when I overhear you singing in the basement, because it means you’re OK, everything is ticking along, it means you’re back to being you, and I haven’t heard that in so long,” and the crying was real, but it wasn’t merely that she was overcome; it was because she saw what she had done, and she hated herself but knew it was too late. (2017) She had ordered a box of soapstone teaspoons. sort of obscure mathematical pettifoggery # the overall love story story, not a tedious recipe of prepositional phrases and forced specificity tell the dream vision, not goals what’s your vision? right now it centers around the boy-- cuz see they start out with the luxury of “falling in love”-- the couple from “work”-- but it’s going to get all mixed up a bit when the army marches through, and he meets the soldier boy who’s wounded and fire eyed and confusingly foreign and so, so pale and hot! he’s not even going to understand at first what he’s feeling--you know the drill: a little bit revulsion, a little bit jealousy, a little bit competition, a little bit macho camaraderie, a little bit fascination, a whole lot of unintentional denial. But it wakes something up that has been sleepy; it ends a long habitual stoning of the heart and mind and groin. it shreds the blueprint. it doesn’t mean he doesn’t still “love” the girl, but-- it’s different. how will it all evolve? writing in the morning is the key to unlocking the day. you don’t necessarily have to use a word count--you can; that’s just one of the things you can choose to do in that morning moment. I trust you though; you’re not a damn baby; I’ll leave it up to the you who is in that morning. Because you’re not the same person each moment; each morning you’re the person who exists in that morning, so who the hell am I to say YOU HAVE TO WRITE FOUR HUNDERD AND TWENTY THREE POINT TWO WORDS OR ELSE YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT BLAAAAAAA!!!! No, you just wake up and exist and be there and make your fingers move. Your weird pink large nameless quiet friends will do the rest. simply waking up, again, is the only real ritual you need # old quirky slightly spooky hostel in Scotland I don’t want to write “about” It because I fear I wouldn’t do it justice and it would be really hard to try and get it all right. Let’s say I had ridden my bike there. The gist was: by day it was kind of lonely and puzzling and a bit unwelcoming. The old guy was weird. There were closed doors. A bratty teenage boy on a bike who left quickly. Something was going on but I wasn’t sure what and no one wanted to talk about it. But at night, all these kids like around high school age and some a bit older showed up. At first they were kind of sneery but after a while we all got to talking and they seemed to kind of accept me a bit and a couple of the girls even kind of seemed to like me, and we sat around the square layout of old couches (the room was kind of inside and kind of outside, with a campfire feel) and talked, and it was simultaneously inane and real, and a couple of the girls sat by me and i felt a slightly awkward but slightly intoxicating mix of paternal and titillated. One of them brought out a joint. I remember saying, “This place is a lot different at night.” I was about ready to ask about some of the other mysterious stuff that I had sensed earlier–the old man, the hidden implication of some kind of “monster” about which there seemed to be a tacit agreement among polite society not to talk. # questions 1. Why was I there in the first place? 2. Who or what was the “monster,” and what if anything was I going to do about it? 3. Was it literally Scotland, a quasi- or alternate Scotland, or some completely different place that just felt like Scotland? # The train tracks is like a teenage girl; the rest of the town is her parents, friends, doctors, lawyers, teachers, strangers, and everyone else both creepy and familiar. The angle of the tracks is the marriage of the celestial and the pedestrian. If there was a god, it would have to have been consulted to get that angle just right. All the interior and exterior and parallel and supplememtary and complementary angles that are the consequence of the way the train tracks slice across highways, streets, rivers, fields, back alleys and tree lines, must be the work of a mad inspired geometrician artist dog who, if it isn’t a god, might as well be described as one because we dumb muddy humans could never get that perfect music so exactly imperfectly perfect, at least not on purpose. The train tracks is alpha waves, is you being able to drift in and out of sleep, a boat on a dark soft current that isn’t there. The train tracks is dragonflies and fireworks and cinnamon smoke drifting across the tops of hazy paintbrush trees. The train tracks is the first time you were in love. The train tracks is taking you home for the first time after you’ve been away at college, your first summer after you’ve been away for your first year, and you’ve been in love, and you’ve breathed the intoxicating otherness of the big city, and everything’s OK, and you’ve got a home to come home to, and the june bug skies are perfect, and the angles of the tracks across and over everyone and everything are perfect, and being in love and scared and queasy with it is perfect, and a granola bar and weak coffee from the café car is perfect, and being alone on a train with a home to go home to is perfect, and you understand and recognize all this; it’s a golden time and you know it while you’re in it, and that’s the most rarest thing of all, when you’re young, so you must be growing up and that’s the saddest thing of all, next to the sound of a train on the tracks angling across and away and above and inexorably into the doppler shifted distance. The tracks slide effortlessly through space above one highway, and stealthily tunnel under another, but by the time you get to Broadway, your own homely little Broadway, it’s like fuck it, the serfs can line up in their jalopies and wait, and so the ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding red and white drops down and you rumble, at that perfect angle, right across everybody’s breakfast and coffee and morning and all the boring perfect details of their lives. Your steaming farmland outskirts reverie begins to lift like morning fog; the hyper-familiar sights of your own dumb little town, painted with exotic sunrise streaks, begin to bring that old contempt and fondness, disdain and respect, weariness and relief—the screeching sounds of slowing down and Who’s going to be meeting you at the station, then? # Welcome to another Hot Ham and Rolls Day We haven’t quite yet worked out the full rules for these days—if there even are any. So far it seems like: - Sunday - emphasis on spillage or silage (don’t forget to put giant-ass white plastic tarps over it and label it with the year and the last name or some kind of initials or something) - What’s the point, though? Why get up early just to ramble? - I mean, Carolyn did it, so there must be something to it, right? - Yeah, but didn’t she do something after it, too? - Well, that’s beside the point—*for now.* - It’s basically just an opportunity to get up early, have a coffee, see the sunlight bank-shot in through the slightly dirty window around the edges of the tattered gingham curtain— - Do you think I use too many prepositional phrases? - Is the coffee ready yet? Not yet, hon, she says. Time freezes again. So this is the National Bakery. You wouldn’t barely hardly even know it was here unless you knew someone around here who would tell you that it’s the best place to go, hands down, for hot ham and rolls on Sunday. They have a special. Basically you’re getting the rolls for free. There’s a painted plywood sign out front facing Main Street. The laundromat is to your right as you’re facing the door—“OUR WATER IS RAIN SOFT AND PLENTY OF IT.” The coffee is ready and she brings you some. There aren’t a ton of tables here; it’s not exactly a sit-down restaurant; most people come and pick up big flat floppy white paper boxes of baked goods and then leave. But there is a counter next to the display case. It’s topped with yellow formica that if you look close is a little scratched up but also has a chaotic pattern of pink and purple and gray fine interlocking boomerang/amoeba shaped lines. There’s usually an old man or men sitting there. There’s also two booths by the front windows, and one table that hardly anyone ever sits at because it sort of doesn’t really fit in anyplace; you feel like you’re kind of in the middle of the room and the table top is a little too small because when you come to a place like this, in the unlikely event you’re actually going to sit here for a while, you kind of want to either fit right in with the baked goods (camouflage) by sitting up at the counter, facing away from the daylight and what little traffic there is at this hour on a Sunday; or else you want to have a little room to stretch out and own the space you’re in; nothing’s so luxurious as having your own whole side of a booth to lean back into, with the love and warmth and safety of having someone you’re connected to in some arbitrary way sitting across that broad clean table from you—close but not too close. This is one of the few places that’s not an actual restaurant where you can still drink coffee out of a real ceramic mug. Although it’s kind of a weirdly shaped one—these mugs are designed to be stacked, so the top two thirds is regular coffee mug diameter, but the bottom third is a skinnier cylinder. Why am I telling you this? Because it’s hot ham and rolls day, and a Sunday morning, and anything goes. That’s the unutterable luxury of being alive right now, at this moment “in history” as they say, although as we’re about to find out, we’re not “in history” at all, not by a long shot, as the armies of armageddon and hilarity are at this very moment tromping cacophonously, improbably towards you across the farm lands to the northeast. So enjoy that coffee. It’s pretty good; not so fabulous as to be a distraction, but good enough and exactly the right hotness. Enjoy that ham and rolls. Now this, on the other hand, is almost too good. It’s one of the main reasons people keep jingling in and out the heavy glass door, after all. The ham is shaved, buttery light thin salty steaming. The rolls—they call them hard rolls, but they’re not exactly hard. How would you describe them? I mean besides just saying “They’re perfect; just go there some Sunday and you’ll see what I mean”? Enjoy that friend from work. Why is she so beautiful all of a sudden? How have you worked in the same building with her for — years, and never noticed the radiance and music that pours off her, the echo to the sunlight every time she shakes her mane or swishes her tail? Wait so she’s a horse? Ha ha no, I’m just— Enjoy that good laugh, really feel how it stretches your muscles and makes your face have a mind of its own. You’ve got some hard days and nights ahead of you, and you’re going to need every belly laugh you can get. National Bakery. They don’t advertise it as such, but it’s the most civilized place on earth—just like every other place like this, where you can be in love without making a big stupid deal about it. Enjoy it. # People are joshing and jostling, fanning out across the parking lot in reverse. You unlock the passenger-side door for C—, manually, using the actual key in the lock because the little beeper thing hasn’t worked for years. You have to move a little bit of empty cups or bottles or other detritus so she can sit down. Maybe a little embarrassing, but you never really have anyone ride in the— It’s OK. She genuinely doesn’t seem to care, which is refreshing. You’re used to people caring about shit like that while pretending not to. So what’s for breakfast? You know, I could really go for some hot ham and rolls. There’s this place over by the— Oh yeah, on the corner there, by the laundromat? Yep, that’s the one. So you drive slowly over there, slowly it seems because everyone, what few other people are out on the road right now as the sun’s coming up over the tattered false fronts of the old downtown, is driving slowly for some reason; it’s almost like you’re driving a real car across a fake setting, positioning the car on a stage, as a prop. But when you get there the steel grille is down over the front of the NATIONAL BAKERY. That’s weird. So you’re like well what about Mickey’s? But Mickey’s is closed too. So’s the Mexican place by the roundabout. Hang on, what about Main Street? So you circle three quarters of the way around the roundabout, and head off perpendicularly. None of the little kitschy shops on Main are open, and neither is that diner you like, and neither are any of the other restaurants that you’ve never been to because they always seemed a little too precious for a town this size. Well what the fuck. Why is nobody— Then you notice that there are no more other cars on the road. The traffic light at Broadway isn’t working. Well of course, the power is out everywhere, duh. But that doesn’t explain why there’s no one— C—’s like well let’s just go to my house. I’ve got some stuff we can make, and maybe by that time the power will be— You follow her turn by turn directions towards an old Polish two and a half story wood frame house on 2nd. It’s pleasantly dilapidated and the still-new sun is glancing off the southeast corner and filtering through the boughs of one ridiculously grand black hills spruce that looks a little out of place and smells fucking fantastic. Park on the gravel, slam slam go the car doors and you follow her up five uneven wood steps to the front porch. Something seems like déjà vu for a minute as she fumbles with one of those keychains that has too much dangling jingling crap on it. Finally the door wiggles and creaks and before you is a bare wood staircase, with some tiny spatters of some long ago color of paint on the banister. There’s a door to the right, and the hallway also leads towards another door straight ahead towards the back of the house. Choose your own adventure? She laughs. The upstairs is mine. She starts up and you follow, a couple steps behind, and the interlocking rhythms of your work shoes on the old treads is cavernous and theatrical. She’s wearing jeans, and you really only notice now, because of the way following someone up a flight of stairs kind of makes your face inevitably close to their ass, that her # Your footfalls could sound like anything. Tired, tired, tired, tired, tired. Whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp. Love, love, love. Angling across the parking lot towards fate. There is something inside you that is symphonic on a cosmic scale. You have a jovian spectacle inside your chest; but not just inside your chest where any fool could place a stethoscope and listen—deeper; the “inside” that means “where no one will ever find it, not even you.” Scientists, cosmologists, philosophers, and common laborers do a lot of assuming; you assume everyone is at least in this one respect like you: that spinning globules of dark matter and energy are silently conducting all of history and every possible future inside your dark hearts, simultaneously, harmonically, chaotically, stochastically, and perfectly, right now and forever and across the farthest reaches of unimaginable time, as you walk more or less together across the parking lot toward the amber lights, the bricks, the candle-colored counterpoint to the ice-black curvature of space surrounding everything. A few winking crystals of snow drift across the alley, echoing the few stars that poke through the desert haze of streetlights and impending day. This is a quiet town, most days. Black cables sag from roof to roof. Someone’s dilapidated van hulks broodingly behind four dumpsters. Your footfalls could sound like anything; right now they grunt okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, I’ll go. A whirling particle, possessing a charge not of my own design, I will collide with—fate? Cigarettes that died for your sins lie bent in chrome-rimmed sand. Walk past them up the ramp, into the cheerful oven door that leads to what for some reason you think of as “work.” Forget everything: how you got here, what you dreamed, what sleep felt like, how you chose your clothes, what it’s like back in your room, the road, its speed, the unfinished sunrise, how a cat thinks and moves, that giant orb inside your chest. Forget everything but what you need right now, which is hands and feet and what the mouth eats. It’s the usual bustle inside. Another human greets you, her face a sun or a pie. Seeing her is comforting, like a friend’s house when you’re twelve and live in a suburb with no sidewalks but you have each other and can watch TV. Morning M—, she says. Morning, C—. Why do humans always have to tell each other what time of day it is? Would they forget otherwise? She hands you a donut. Then there’s a stuttering shudder, and the lights go out. Fans, suddenly silent, slow to stillness. Machinery gurgles to a stop. Every powered sound flies off a cliff, into a sudden gulp of quitness overtaking everything, the way the waves do when you’re in a speedboat and finally kill the engine. You rise up on a sloshing wave of preternatural calm, return to prehistory; the solar system in your guts can for a fraction of an instant be heard, and so can everyone else’s in the glance you all exchange, a secret, silent escape velocity of shared forbidden knowledge— If the power doesn’t come back on soon, they’ll have to lock the place up and everyone will have to go home. Go home. Like when you’re twelve, and home means a certain kind of carpet, and certain comforting ever-so-faintly musty smell, rectangular walls and predictability and— You munch your donut. People talk, and weave and in out of each other’s paths of knowledge, communicating with other swarms of humans in other rectangles of brick and plaster and wood and metal, and eventually it comes down the line that it’s a transformer or something, or whatever would be major enough, whatever, look it up a major job, somebody else’s major job fortunately, somebody with their own set of planets and moons inside their own chest, and so the heavy hasps clang together and iron doors concede a rhythmical exception, and everybody gets the fuck out. They amble laughing, ovine or canine, across the asphalt, jaggedly approximating the lines they followed mere moments ago, going the other way. You glance at C— and C— glances at you and some tiny pulse makes a tiny vibrating sound and so you’re like, out of the blue, hey, you want to go get some breakfast and she’s like ha ha sure, why not, and it’s decided that you’ll drive because she walked to work, and you didn’t even know that she lived close enough to walk, so that’s something to talk about for a few seconds and then who knows. The sun has finally finished coming up and as you walk side by side toward your car (she doesn’t even know which car is yours), your footfalls could sound like anything, but right right now they sound like a little kid eagerly clomping up the stairs to a high platform to feed the giraffes. # There’s nothing particularly wrong with being late, unless a boulder falls on you and crushes you because you’re still standing there, and not already gone like you would have been if you were on time. They call it middle school but it’s more like getting crushed by a giant boulder every day. You hit snooze four or five times but for some reason you don’t have a mom or dad to yell at you & so you’re just late & so everyone (you thought) notices you, which if you don’t particularly like to perform (preferring invisibility as a superpower, too young to know it’s poison but too old to still imagine flying as an option) is not such a great thing; those boulders hurt! You might have even been a girl then, except that you weren’t and didn’t know you even might have been because you didn’t even know you were still malleable, hadn’t been formed, were full of potential; at a time in your life when everything is the most fluid, you were so sure of your own solidity. The double horseshoes and mobius squares of the hallways seem to get more fractal every day. You go up or down some stairs. Walk past banks of lockers. Everything is beige, the color of polluted river water. Also there’s that kid. The one that likes to hilariously remind everyone that you’re a cocksucker. You do a slow speed chase scene with him almost every day. If you have to go to the bathroom, he’ll be somewhere in the hallway to stab you with needles. He has the perfect sneer and so everyone respects him. He has real hair unlike you. He’s like the wrong side of a magnet to you; you’re always invisibly trying to be repelled to the opposite corner but something always flips you around and he’s always there, and his adoring minions are always not too far away. Someone has to laugh at the performance, after all. You did finally learn to start saying shit back to him, though, and finally, today, it comes to a verbal standoff: (insult) (escalated insult) (ridiculous insult) (maybe one more insult) (finally, a truly nasty, personal, cutting insult that’s really just one step over the line--something about your parents maybe?) (genuinely threatening insult that surprises even its utterer) You stand there staring at each other like lions, or bamboo, or fire ants. There is a strangely luxurious quiet. Because you were late today, there’s no minions, so this isn’t even a performance. But you both did a really great job coming up with horrible things to say, there’s no denying that. (Can’t we just respect each other as artists?) (Yeah, OK, sure, why not.) (All right then, let’s do that.) And so you walk away, and that part of your life is over and now it’s a different part of your life, even though the halls are still impossibly hyperdimensional and folded in on themselves and you still haven’t made it to class. You go down or up some stairs and are on your way around a corner past some beige lockers, when one of the minions, sprawled on the floor outside a classroom, surrounded by generic sub-minions whose faces are already sliding off your memory, still emboldened from some typical exchange yesterday, though the real-haired kid is nowhere in sight and the minion has no idea that it’s a new part of life now, tries to say something he thinks his captain, his hero of sneers would say; Cocksuker etc etc, but you cut him off: (Shut the fuck up... M—’s funny. You’re not funny.) Amazingly, satisfyingly, the little shit shuts up and goes back to just being some generic kid with an idiotic haircut. *the halls the lockers the bathrooms etc etc they must have remodeled recently; none of this looks familiar* You go to the bathroom and think about the things we take for granted like for instance the taps don’t put out salt water. There’s a starfish in the sink. Eventually the tide rises and the halls fill with water. You do the breast stroke against the current, trying to get to class before it’s all over. # Introducing Hot Ham and Rolls Day certain things make it harder to write what if sunday were spillage day but then that makes it seem like maybe the other days couldn’t have spillage involved, which could be kind of choking well OK what if instead we call Sunday “Hot Ham and Rolls Day”? some things that make it harder to write: - thinking - not knowing where your glasses are - being tired because of what you ate and drink and smoked and avoided and worried about yesterday - having it get more and more complicated, like your schedule I mean, like instead of just “get up every day and do it” it becomes - get up mon thru fri and do it - skip saturday because you have to deliver the mail - even though that bitch bitched you out at 861 - sunday you get up but you get up a little later and make your goal a little less and let it be “Hot Ham and Rolls Day” - well, OK maybe that’s not that bad actually, if we stop there. that’s probably a manageable level Hey, I just noticed something. I got up and am doing this and it’s not that bad. I mean I was tired as FCUK a minute ago, and everything was pointless, and everything probably still is pointless, but I did after all get up instead of just totally not getting up and now that I sat down and started touching this rectangular thing with my finger pads, it really isn’t that bad. Is it “doing any good” or “wasting my time” or whatever? I don’t know, but as Steve Geibel once told me, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll be a rotting frozen squirrel on the side of Roosevelt Road soon enough anyway, right? Might as well sit here in this cave for a while before then, because we got - invisiblue water with the sunlight striations - hard slick wet rocks - your best friend and her hair is wet and her face is bright New rules: - leave your glasses where you can find them - even get the coffee apparatus as ready as possible, if nothing else so that you don’t have to turn the lights on too soon - don’t buy a computer, but do buy some new thermal coffee cups - but not the best, most expensive cups with impressive specs. Just basically OK, decent, not gross, not particularly amazing cups - never buy a computer when you can borrow one or be issued one instead - take a break from smoking pot. If you follow this schedule, you will feel a difference - take a break from drinking so much beers. You typically drink from one to three more beers than you really even want. Usually you want the first beer, but then the rest you have to cram in sideways like pink pearl erasers down your throat because you’re done with the beer but you still want to be drunk - it’s OK to crumple up stuff and throw it away - love yourself - love your friends - love your family - reserve a special place for loving Anne The light just turned green, but because it’s Sunday and it’s “Hot Ham and Rolls Day,” it’s OK to keep going. After I’m done here I’m going to make a new trash can although I probably shouldn’t. So let’s see, what else could be part of HHARD? We could have idle speculative “planning....” So, for example: - we could have the guy go to work - and talk to someone - they could decide to leave or do something stupid - it could turn out that his work isn’t mundane after all but he has to think of it as mundane or else it’s impossible to do a good job at it - we could have the guy not go to work - because he smashed or something smashed into his car at the last second - or he got confused and didn’t know where he was and just kept driving into a shadow world What did I learn from today’s little session? - writing is fun and hard - getting up out of bed is hard but fun - I still remember what it’s like to be in love and it’s kind of nice still and still kind of secret and astonishing, even if I’ve swirled around the outer edge of that galaxy and am somewhere distant in a spiral arm around a rapidly expiring star that no one’s ever heard of now. Yeah, I still love her and that’s still kind of amazing and quiet and scary and exciting and what do I do about it though? anything? how? Now if I want to I can go back to bed or I can just sit here, I think I’ll just sit here for a little while and bask in the quiet amazement of just sitting here having done this and been here. “A sudden influx of joy.” “My [[large nameless quiet friend]]....” In *Kiki’s Delivery Service,* the adolescent ventures out and a un-ostenatiously wise older woman takes her in and gives her a home, and but then she loses her powers and a different kind of wise slightly older woman takes her in and tells her it’s OK to take a break and do some other stuff, your powers will come back later, and they do come back (though slightly changed) *when she really needs them.* I feel like I’m still that adolescent girl. I’ve been looking sideways at the Pleiades for like thirty-five years now; I can see them bright or I can bring them into focus, but not both at the same time. But I think it’s kind of cool that I’ve never quite given up. I kind of like that about myself, even if it’s kind of dumb. The parts of writing I’m aware of: - physical part (getting out of bed, touching the actual keys (or whatever—is “tecnological” its own part?), alpha waves, randomness) - mental part (when you see a pattern and pick a good time and place to tweak, polish, plan, carve, decide; the elements of storytelling) - social part (the giving act of love that is storytelling; even if it’s only some small trickle, you gotta be water and you gotta flow somewhere) - historical part (the long conversation that you’re a part of) - spiritual part? I hate that word lately though but I feel almost obligated to include it because I kind of felt it today (must be some ineffable combination of all of the above I guess) # Better make it six; I want to go fishing. Drive first. You don’t need any of that silly shit like music, radio, headphones, soda, food—nothing corn-based or sugar-based. Start with the mindless, the auto-pilot, the wide open, the simple and stupid. Just basically aiming at where the sun’s going to be. You’re in a box with windows, open to anything. Leave your glasses where you can find them. Coffee’s probably OK, permissible, given that you— After all, it’s been so long since— You can check what time it is from time to time, but you can’t do anything about it. That’s the beauty of being in the box, in the capsule. There really is no time; it’s a deep dive with one breath; it’s the time underwater when, surounded by people, you’re truly alone. You didn’t even know how sacred that was. Is the coffee hot enough? Is it cool enough yet? It sits there waiting for you. This is a civilized hour. Nobody cares about you, who you “are” etc. There is no “where you come from” etc. There are always plenty of perfect places you could stop, but you don’t stop because you’re not “there” yet, and that’s the beautiful thing. It’s not an accomplishment, it’s not a song; but your heart sings. Sings, and you can’t even hear it. It’s the beautiful, hissing, timeless silent time, and you’re in it, and you don’t even know it. So drive, and then when you’re done with that, drive. Coffee’s good. How it burns your mouth, bitter and sweet like licorice bark. You’re probably thinking something. Two plus two, equations, proofs, innuendo, fragments of a song, allusion, a sly tyrranosaurus, the pages of someone’s memory, sacred and anonymous like a pebble. And like a pebble, it— And like a pebble, And like a pebble— Just a quiet picture in your mind now, the underwater tumbling, the radiating ripples left behind, the filtered gold of where the sun used to be. Still driving. A tightness comes out of your neck. You could turn on the radio. There are little buttons you could press, knobs you could turn, pleasantly knurled. You have options. It’s a veritable command center. Someone built all this for *you,* you know? You could go fast, faster, you could accelerate to a velocity no-one could possibly ever require, moving this great metallic mass faster, smashing through the air—but you don’t have to go as fast as you *could* go. Crook your arm behind the empty passenger seat, position of inarticulate openness. Still awake? Highway hypnosis is real, you know. Those humming dashes white against wet black, shot like arrows from the direction of your inevitable oblivion... All it would take... just one lapse, miscalculation, maybe you secretly want to— But not today. Today you actually do have somewhere to go. There’s no neat way to wrap things up just now; that would be too easy. There’s no “just drive” without, paradoxically, a destination of some sort. A destination’s like a contract, an agreement with death or just a friend or a job or something a little less mysterious than it really feels at this hour. If you don’t have any place to go, then driving itself becomes a “thing,” and then that ruins it. The focus can’t be on the driving itself. For a space to be suffused with the subtle power of the infinite, it has to be “in between.” To be in between, it can’t be precious or golden, can’t be bespoke—for the sake of this anonymous, forgettable perfection— (you are, you’re waking up now, aren’t you, despite the bright & selfish desires of your dreams) —you had better be going to work. But, thank god or whatever, you have to drive first. So that’s what you’re doing. Not wrapping anything up. Not waiting for that perfect little spot, that hiking trailhead, that puppy-love café. Not improvising. Not a “free spirit,” not a character, not a goddamned poet. Just somebody going to work, and don’t even make a big deal out of that, as if humility could make it merit commemoration. This drive may be a ritual, but it ain’t no ceremony. Stop thinking of yourself. You gotta be able to laugh at yourself, right, that’s what they say— There’s a sudden influx of joy. The freeway ends in one mile. You’ll slow down. Maybe not as suddenly as the speed limit signs tell you to, but by the time you get to the little town, the roundabout, the carpet store, the train tracks, the bank, and the mexican restaurant, you’ll be doing close enough to twenty five. You’re almost there. Almost there.