When you get the mean reds.

Walking my boy late at night with whisky in my mug, and on the sidewalk I pass someone a few years younger than me singing an old punk song--actually, sneering it, a spat at the air between herself and her next steps--with her face painted, streaked black like a spiderweb or some KISS tryout. And she is carrying an umbrella and a stereo, with great and long, thin sheets of plastic tucked into her ball cap, whose beak is upturned. I nod as she interrupts those lyrics to say hello.

And curiously, on my way back homeward she is a block ahead. I can hear her shouting toward nothing, even her muttering is loud enough. I pause when she stops for a moment to trade the stereo's hand for the umbrella. When she starts again she swaggers, tapping that umbrella on the concrete to flare its grey up with attitude. Like seeing a sashay out of Breakfast at Tiffany's, though her song streaming back has changed to those do-do-do's from "Low Rider," and nodding my head at that, because everyone deserves that feeling up there.

The only desert within our means.

One evening not long ago, while walking through the park I saw an old man in clean shirt and slacks pull up to the curb and calmly walk over to a young tree. He leaned down and scooped his grocery bag full with mulch, then placed the bag into his trunk and drove down the street.

Yesterday afternoon I watched a woman crouching in the thick heat and following a pigeon as it hopped along the sidewalk, she trying to pour water onto it out of a plastic bottle.

This morning I listened to the basement dwellers beneath me argue about something that got lost as words progressed, becoming a drone about the other's persistent argument and nag, both voices sharing the perfect moaning characteristic.

And I sit beneath a ceiling fan, watching its strings push, my little one flopping over in his sleep and letting out his little dog groan. Holding a book and alone in this apartment, I miss my lips and spill coffee on my shirt with no one to see.

Summit.

There are two very different voices about state ideals here, but it is not difficult to know on which end there is an active comradery. Endless hundreds of police officers in riot gear who box in both protesters and bystanders on public streets and detain them without explanation is not in the interest of what the Toronto mayor has described as that city's and this country's "democratic ideals." I am interested in the tone behind these people's show of national interests by singing their anthem and what that means for them--and what it means for the riot police who interrupt a peaceful protest, swinging their batons only once--or as soon as--their anthem has finished.

Someone I know pointed out something valuable. Two police cruisers parked across from one another on Queen West were torched yesterday, but only because they were entirely abandoned. Media caught video of people vandalizing and then setting fire to the cars, but there were no police officers in sight. The fact that this is what is constantly shown on television programs such as CP24's enables the legitimization of a 1.2 billion dollar security bill for the G20 summit, so the police cruisers were abandoned there purposefully, like bait. And public, designated protest zones, are squeezed out of the geography.

But the evidence is in the shoes.

Because they know but do not tell.

Here is that wiggling responsibility, then, and my following him around to watch him do bad things on the floor, or hop after our cat, or fall asleep on his back has been making me me wriggle out of my own. I have stacks of books sitting behind me and in front of me, and beach sand still stuck to my feet. I have to retrieve a few hundred dollars for rent and write a few papers, but I am buying brews and writing songs. Responsibility, along with its constant pluralizing, is a difficult gravity to stand under. But this guy swam for the first time, he chews on his leash, and I think he might like me a bit.

In the non-place, a new place.

Replacing a grand disappointment is often made with the adoption of a whole new, wiggling responsibility. It replaces a distant hope with an immediate presence for letting one feel one's worth. Reading Deleuze and Hardt, and thinking that cultural capital very much includes the requirement of a certain level of mentality, gives a picture of our anxious Western world as a place of immaterial power that makes a mind into a discourse. And so a person such as you or such as I may whine in our lives, but only should if I am doing so with the realization that I have been given the gift of having such a place for it. Because of this, that mentality is a burdensome struggle, and a pleasurable burden, and that (soon to come) wiggling responsiblity will be a lovely reminder. And so, in the middle of this, there is a still holding resolution for this still relatively new year, which hopes not to attempt to keep my spirit so abidingly still--and to suppose that all else may as well--but that things flow, and the best footing to look for is only the ability to ride a wavering world.

Strike flat the thick rotundity.

A flock of leaves streamed across the street like a chorus call as my car passed between afternoon and evening. Dribbling past several driveways more, a woman stood in her flower garden near the curb, raking leaves in a windstorm.

Round to rounds / The break in half.

This summer, like two summers ago, I will be living by and beside myself, stretched alone for months on a decades old wood floor, my spine digging, wishing for a horse to ride through the surf, straight forever along this place between everything and nothing, no saddle, but aching for a cat I've barely known to step across my shins or my neck or anywhere, please, and remind me or take me away, fixing.

After that, who knows but God, and it is of little consequence today. And, of course, today is the first time since when that I write something that is not academic, and in wishing to show it today is the day that determines it not to be shown. So those essays, then, where everything is giving way to nothing, where the next weeks of nothing blot everything.