In Twilight Hours

It's a cold night for the hot words that rise up in my mind and threaten to overflow: but only for a moment, on the subway, when I've lost the boundaries of that physically/psychologically/soulfully contiguous something that I dare to call my self, and I am simply a stream of impressions moving through space from god knows where to god knows where. When I reassemble, I am chastened by society, which is every bit as abstract as this self thing monster being, and maybe more so, because it is made of rules, and rules can only be expressed in acts, and acts are likewise produced by matter but not composed of it. What a world. What a mess.

There is a man with an oxygen tank who desires no foam on his cappuccino, who wishes for a beach at 2am and a shameless Italian beauty, who tells stories about making coffee in cans by a roadside while dodging danger, and sometimes I find it in me to wait for the slow moving, as if there were some shred of not-exactly-pity but perhaps patience. I have seen something of what makes men, good or bad, grow old, and I feel for their white hair, their poor eyesight, their memories of yore. Even when they slop their coffee, spill their croissant crumbs, and come in to sit down at a quarter til six. They are at my mercy and so they shall stay.

I am the loom upon which a hundred thousand words are woven daily, entire sentences lifted from the lives of people I cannot even begin to sympathize with because they are remote, because their desires are not my desires, because they have been in the right place at the right time and I am forever somewhere else at some other time of day. If you follow the threads, they will lead you, lead you, they will take you via no shortcuts. There is only the long way 'round and you must proceed hence if you wish to understand. The food that you will eat has been brought up from the earth and set before you, raw pink radishes scrubbed clean like the cheeks of an ordinarily dirty boy on his way to Sunday School, expect nothing to be cooked but perhaps it has already been digested. This is the meaning of the spinner's work, and perhaps this is the way that we layer upon layer our thoughts and our stories going back through the centuries of input and input and input then output as an unsurprising combination of the three.

There can be no revolution in the absence of history. To revolve: to return to a point previous, for the circle is absolute. This, then, is the difference of accounts. The conservative heeds the dead. The revolutionary heeds the longer-dead. And language hides the coffins in the cemetery of its terms, whose function is largely to reinvent what never can be new.


Today's Reads:
Young Women Don't Owe Clinton by Shasta Williams
Untold story: How Scalia's death blew up an anti-union group's grand legal strategy by Michael Hitzik
The Boy Who Heard Too Much by David Kushner
Scalia's death could have quick impact on NC redistricting case by Anne Blythe
The Killer Cadets by Skip Hollandsworth
See No Evil by Skip Hollandsworth
The Diplomat and the Killer by Raymond Bonner
plus 20 pages of Graeber's Debt and
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (courtesy of Existential Comics)
I swear, I don't normally read so many true crime articles...