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."

I would sell my martyr.

Stomping my worn boots into deep puddles on the way home, I kept Bazan up loud and hummed him into the night while my fingers gripped inside my coat pockets. This is a strange place, it is, and I don't just mean this new town I've had to be living in. I mean this darn world. The whole of it. A kind of world where in this town, with a good person I have known for just some short weeks, I would close my evening with my hands circling his back while he cried against me for the pain of something he had lost and was somehow perpetually losing to other turns that could boast no similar kind of infinity. I had said less words than slow and thoughtful murmurs while I listened to him convince himself of some shuttered composure and then let his feelings loosen and shudder all over again, and alongside this I was thinking that my feelings knew his feelings very well, though as a knowledge and empathy that is kept in a simmer deep down. I told him that it is okay to work towards being okay and to not feel okay whatsoever all at once. The conversation, helped by the length of the walk that takes me to my house from his, made me give over to thinking about the phrase I had been hearing from some other places as well, being told that despite a most important circumstance, that "otherwise I am happy." It is something I do not think I can accept when hearing it, because there is no such thing as a happiness otherwise, a happiness that is excepting one or a few objects. Happiness is always only full. And there is a kind of defiance in such a phrase, so that just saying it gives its hidden truth away, that it is not full. That perhaps it is working so hard to chip off a cornerstone of one's very existence in the world, to knock away some part of them that shapes how they know to breathe. One can of course feel pleasure, perhaps drawn from some other circumstance or gained within one's own self. But pleasure, even deep pleasure, is still far apart from happiness if it is existing despite something else. A person can not call themselves happy if the path they are taking towards that happiness very purposefully leaves someone else in a heap. In this way, then, happiness is a social task. There is no way to feel it if you are disallowing another to feel it. So the objects that compose or oppose one's happiness extend beyond one's own self--it also exists out of the happiness you give to, or keep others from having. So neither can happiness be derived from the hurt of another. Not when one is making that hurt become, keeping it in becoming, not no matter how many turns you take.

Mackerel or herring / Hurled into the sea

Walking with this wide world, its raging spin, and the ways that others unimaginably spin and pinball forth and away along our sphere, can rack a person in their shoes. It can transform a person and their paradigm. The way that horizons are created and closed off can leave a person feeling embattled with futility. I have been writing a lot, and reading a bit. I thought it would be an exciting thing to study some languages and to learn some new words for thoughts. There are some that I have not been let to speak, though. But I remember a night some while ago, in a place that I used to live.

I was out on a night time walk, and found myself stepping through a block or two of sleeping street construction. Pylons were strewn everywhere, and the whole asphalt of the street had been ripped out and piled in rows along its sides. It felt like a parted sea of tarred black rock. I stood for a moment, grateful for the feel of dirt beneath my feet in the middle of a city. Then I thought, and I left myself there. I poured the ashes from my pipe, turning it upside down and tapping it lightly on the side. I moved forward, with slow steps down the middle of this sea floor, and as I walked, I drew from my pockets what I had in them, and let them drop. A receipt from some groceries, a bus transfer ticket. A dirty penny, and a clean nickel. Another receipt from the purchase of some delicious burgers. I pulled a thin layer of dirt over this trail to cover it, stamping them where they lay so that rivers of glimmering asphalt could soon spread over them. And as I started my walk over again I knew in my steps something certain, to know them as a place I will always be, and to leave a trail of signals, a line of buoys towards where I will always be.

The assembly of rhythms occupy the house.

In the fury of a youthful mood, I shared a conversation about dreams of future. We all asked each other about what we wanted to do and to be, wondering within whether the form of our ideal paths could be made into something lived and substantial. Each thought hard, negotiating in their minds the fought pull between things dreamed and restrictively realistic. And at my turn, I gave my answer. I have given it several times before to friendly smirks and prods, resulting from the swift recitation I was able to give. So by this occasion I had learned to pretend at hesitation and spontaneity in my answer, feigning a surprise at the development of my own wishes. It eases the reception when the delight of my first answer is to have two dogs (maybe more), a cat, and a horse, to live near some woods and meadows where I can ride through mornings while my seat and my eyes still higher than the cool sun at dawn and dusk. Among these souls, I would want to be a writer, enough to subsist in such a place. And if not that, then I would love to be a professor, where I would then also be reading as much as I am writing, but can actively relate my own ideas to a whole community of others on a basis that would be so brilliantly regular. And then, if neither of those things, then I would seek to own a cafe, with a lending library and a little shelf of board games. A cafe that would host knitting circles and philosophy reading groups, and invite art exhibitions and musical performances. And among all of those things, my days and my writing will be composed with thoughts of love. Those are all things that I can do, I think, and all of which would make me happy enough. To live in such circumstances, and to be among such furry souls, is now my youthful path to seek. When I think of them, I feel pleased at the simplicity by which they are thought, for my negotiation between a dream and my own steps can include all those with ease. All except for one--though one that is now beyond me.