Once again and innumerable times more.

The other day I was outside on the library steps, sitting with a coffee and the cold, and a young woman sat down beside me. She had dark, good eyes. Her boot laces were coming undone, and she pulled them loose next to me. I have a demon inside me, she said, as she pulled the ropes open. We know what you mean, I said. But she didn't get the joke. And I saw her then, and said, what does it feel like? She pushed her hair from her face and said with all her breath that it feels like something is always pulling her laces apart. I watched. I can tell that you know, she said without looking up, tucking her jeans into her boots. We send ourselves. The waves of hair fell over her face again, and she looked to me. Her mouth parted, but without saying anything she got up and walked without turning back. And I watched my fingers reddening in the cold air.

Devorans tempora.

A story of giants.

Here, to smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together it's fantastic. Or to draw: you know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it's a good line. Or when your hands are cold, you rub them together.

I have been inundating myself with films, because of course. There has been your Twin Peaks, my Days of Heaven, Eyes Wide Shut, Synecdoche, New York, and on, like Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. They make threads that weave between. Some short while ago I was watching a television programme, or perhaps a movie, though actually not at all--but I remember watching, in myself, a line of thought about voice and suffocation that ran through and beyond this programme on the screen. Some images of a contentment that glares, one that keeps a steady demand of the depth and frequency of conversation with another person--a demand whose results are the inverse of depth and frequency. Surprised by the violence of casualness. There, it is absolute. The way that a person waits until the very end of a phone call to give their least, their meager apology to the greatest trouble. And all the time conducting a beastly happiness, a slanderous facade that works to sing all the louder when it realizes that its feet stand in acid and rot. I do not know what that might feel like to understand it, I do not think I could know. I do not know what it is like to eschew the account of all that is present, and to demand ignorance. I have been watching these films that are somehow all strung together, and I realized this morning, while watching one of them, that it is in the way that these people walk through their scenes. Their walks are among what has been peeled off, but still prodding and clenching the spot that is left there, true steps in decisions of honesty. I was thinking also of the violence in certain paradoxes, ones that offer an opportunity for conversation when, long before, the offering has already been made impossible and refused to be mutually overcome. Yeah, I thought. Yes, I said. Tonight I will watch Bottle Rocket.

I used to make long speeches to you after you left. I used to talk to you all the time, even though I was alone. I walked around for months talking to you.

Nothing with any certainty.

Things seen and heard this season:

-Two shoes on the sidewalk. Both the same kind of shoe, but both were left shoes, and both were the same size.

-An old man with a large pot belly, wearing only underpants, rollerblading past my house.

-"My leg's crooked, alright? My leg is uneven." From a woman walking around the corner, alone.

-"You don't want to be caught out in left-center field."

-Bus stop advertisement for real estate agent George Georgopoulous, email george@georgegeorge.com.

-On my first bus ride, a man who was denied a ride launching a ball of spit that hits the window beside my head.

-A recycling bin brimming with only discount brand lemon-lime plastic soda bottles.

-Another recycling bin with an enormous mirrorball balanced on top of it.

-A near victim to my own misplaced rage, a drunken undergraduate student who was pushed into me, recipient to my height and sharp words.

-Somewhere around fifty dogs chasing each other about a dog park on a late Sunday afternoon.

-Misty, a stranger, a drunken woman in a Team Canada warm-up suit, accosting me for my pants and then crawling under a table in an attempt to remove them.

-A million conversations about lost jobs and hard times.

-Late at night, a young man in his front kitchen window making a salad and a grilled cheese while I with my headphones stood and sang out quiet songs to wish a good meal.

-My own questionable voyeurism.

-"You look rich--are you rich?" and, "You've got pet hair on your face."