Dry awakeness.

Felt like it was arriving right just as I was leaving class, a flash freeze this past week that interrupted a few days of warmth. When it does, the wet from the couple days of thaw before gets caught, still hanging in the air as it frosts on us. Everyone walking with their shoulders bunched, hurrying home to whatever luck awaits them there.

People were walking quickly. They were bustling to resist the cold, with a slight lean and eyes leading along the ground about ten feet before them--all except for this one standing on the bridge. He stood straight, and he was round and motionless with hands tucked in khaki pants. He stood standing on the bridge ahead of me, not noticing the traffic or passersby, but looking onto the cold river below and at the sunset over the park trees, away in the distance and looking like the bright fade of watercolour. There is a long hill that runs downward on my walk back home, and the whole time I walked it I could see this person standing there, through the lengths of minutes, looking out to the frigid water.

He was watching the group of geese and ducks who had remained the whole winter and had formed some kind of a fraternity. All day they were sitting there, it seemed, every time I walked past them to campus or with our boy on a leash. As I got closer, the whole picture looked better--the unmoving smear of pink and purple against grey sky, hanging over the bridge and the icy river flow. I was just about caught up to the onlooker. But in a flash, the birds all decided to up and fly off down the river and into the sun. He watched this too, then slowly turned and walked away.

The consolation of life.

What else, but that after deciding to eat one million cookies, I run short by about a million less a couple dozen.

I then thought that I might clean out my old email drafts, and wondered whether I should now send them all to their originally intended recipients. Maybe like a slightly discomforting, ghostly revisiting of circumstances long past. There were three and four year old letters of advice to friends who were deeply lost in their troubles. But maybe like finding an old letter or to-do list in something you haven't worn since a couple winters ago. There were all kinds, but what I liked most was a long, long exchange about a Doggie. A silly experience of a radio show turned somehow injurious for my good friend Greg. A reply to the request for a water bottle. A whole-soul, half-sentenced response to being told I was brave three years ago, incomplete because of the inevitable limitations that are given to all-of-the-heart expressions when they are verbalized.

Twenty-nine email drafts that have accumulated over the last five years or so, residing in their incompleteness as accidental reminders of complete, bursting moments, and how all continues here, in this day.

If lookin' likin' move.

And the flowers are still standing.

Listening to my head today, and these are the films that crossed my mind in correlation with the scapes of my walk home from campus:

American Psycho
Good Will Hunting
Ghostbusters
No Country For Old Men
The Notebook
Uncle Buck
Blue Streak
You've Got Mail
The Hours
The Family Stone

Like the wind and the weather.

Some long while ago I was sitting on a bright front porch with someone I know, conversing and breathing in the sunlight. It was just past noon on a Saturday and Thanksgiving was coming up, so, as is the way things go, the conversation was guided toward tradition. I could not think of any family Thanksgiving traditions aside from the obligatory meals and wine. Nothing like afternoon sports games or gift exchanges, or any nights of song. We wondered together about starting some tradition, and how it could persist long enough to become one.

In the good, slow energy pent up in those mornings, the talk turned as it would, and when I leaned forward to stretch into its comfort I was reminded of the origins of bodily aches I no longer think of. Two of them: the first, a popping, snapping creak in my wrist and my shoulders. Years ago I worked at an auto parts plant, and the automatic lines were built for people much shorter than me. The second, a tightness that appears as it chooses throughout my back, gained from an accident in my car. It rolled down a ditch several times, and I was jostled along inside while it did, my shins crashing against the dashboard and my body swinging and straining into the seatbelt.

These things, lingering aches and pains, can be carried a long distance, long enough to know they are still carried even though it is forgotten what for--to cling to them so they remain long enough to integrate themselves into a habit of thought and motion, and to become a thing that you are so resolutely in disagreement with that it blots out all else, without being able to recall why. But I never think about these things. Once that sun got high enough, the warmth it lent was all else a person could need there. Porches are good for that.