Le Café de nuit.

We who are the tenants of what has become known as the customer service industry are offered a unique perspective of a person's inner workings when viewed from across that countertop. Often it is a seemingly endless repetition of impersonal greetings and instructions, a mechanical algorithm. And there are these rare occasions where a person will instead show a deep honesty. One recent night, a finely dressed middle-aged woman comes in to receive some lattes from our store. She would drift a little to the side as she approached from the door, and when she had, her voice's volume rose and lowered unnaturally. She had the kind of eyes that a bottle of wine will gift a person. And she was exasperated as her husband waited outside, parked in a needlessly large SUV or something of the sort. Perhaps she could have used anything other than what she ordered, so I offered her a small pastry on the side. And, with what I hoped would sound a caressing jest, I said now don't share that with anyone. That treat is all your own. She swayed with her drink tray. Share, she said, as if I had taunted her for a retort--share with him? Twenty-five years with him. Can you even believe it. Her speech slowed so that the last was not even a question. My surprise made our eyes meet again before she turned to leave, and the sincerity in hers gave to me only a steady, defeated look of unfathomable despair.

Somehow dreadfully cracked about the head.

One of those captcha boxes today said 'halmersi' to me. And I know this sounds a logical stretch but, well, you know. So I started thinking about what those letters say when you sound them out, and how the phrase 'have mercy', all anxiously shouted upwards, seems to have so much more meaning when radically slurred. A refined language loses the deepest levels of meaning. Fanon, Bhabha, Melville, Rimbaud, and on. Have mercy.

Only a wisp of smoke from the chimney.

Now, to wonder what a home is and what makes it so. I hear it said to be a word, a name, a strong one. And that it is no house, no beam or shingle, that it is life's undress rehearsal. That home is where one starts from. I wonder at the unity of souls which make a home, which warm the walls that house them. It seems a home is built upon humility and humanism, its foundation laid by a future's presence. Not a house. And, see, that one may have a blazing hearth in one's soul.

Old odd ends stolen out of holy writ.

Writing and now reading these stories about figures who move behind the plots graduates in/with intoxication. Long ago with In the Skin of a Lion, right now in The Winter of Our Discontent, and Mr. Ethan Hawkley seems to be guiding his circumstances while they at the same timeevolve of their own accord, the other characters thinking as they do. As the circumstances unfold I keep finding myself with some certain expectation, only to be softened with a grey surprise as the pages flip, then flop. Some character who lets the others create events and atmosphere, spinning their motion by sitting back to watch and wait. There is such a difference to be seen in the same young man sitting in a cafe window, whether simply watching the faceless walkers drifting along the sidewalk outside, or waiting for some one who is not arriving. The same stillness, or perhaps swivelling movements, the same one there.

Whether by uproar, music, or cries for help.

"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed."

I think about this sentence, and in addition think about it within its contextualizing passages, while writing. I do not have conversations about writing with writers very often, and so am unsure of how others tend to go about. But when I write, I have found that I tend to draw my past in with a slow stroke, with some deep inhalation, and sprinkled unevenly with imagination. Or perhaps not just my past, but any aspect of my real life, present circumstances inarguably included.

So I'm writing an album right now while in the process of recording it. And some of the songs' lyrics are already existant from long ago, where their present circumstances were relevant. Some are of other topics that are relevant as we speak. The two are entirely separate. So what I wish to try, and what I'm finding to be incommunicable, is to convey the notion that all of those words sit in my pockets of history, themselves unchanging. But what those words mean when I sing them have changed. It is difficult to present not simply the changed meaning but that secret process of change to make everything whole.

When men of reason go to bed.

If you're asleep all the time.

Days like these make me think of films or pictures where people go mad from the heat. Shirts are sticking, kids are running around with ice cream cones and hula hoops, dogs are in closed doorways with their tongues hanging out their open mouths. These scenes with, remember, those faded old Coca-Cola signs. Everything is a yellowy pale grey. And I don't like a sweaty brow, but hot skin is something so good you can't just imagine it. Maybe to another it's thought best to stay inside where the air is conditioned for comfort, when outside you can see how your eyes change. It gets so hot you can't touch anyone or anything, so I just stand up on my toes, as if either about to reach for something higher up there, or to step quietly enough to avoid a disturbance.