felt it slipping away
i felt today start to slip away around 2:00, after a foul burger at a previously respected diner. blech. felt like i was eating socks.
now
i
can
do
line
breaks
at least i think i can. a recent posting here read like a blizzard of consciousness stream when in fact a series of well-appointed line breaks might have made the ramble seem more sensible. or maybe not.
i am sitting at an open window, waiting for the rains to come. watching the peoples and the yellow cabs amble and motor past. i may be 42 but i feel like the same whiny 20-something i was long ago. i thought of this today when i noticed, once again, that my age is a number which punctuates my every day. i don‘t know if it lands upon my first waking moments. does it? it used to, and i suspect it still does, out of such routine as to go unnoticed. i remember when i was 32, and how as a teenager that age had seemed like a magical realm of confidence and ease in life. beethoven, i had heard, was comfortable in his craft during his mid-30s, and i was intrigued by a radio story about a novelist who had great success in his 20s but chose to leave public life at 32. those two unrelated anecdotes made 32 seem like a prime age, a crux of one‘s life. i can‘t remember if, at 32, the morning blunt of a number felt heavy or fleet. i can not remember how 32 felt, but today i felt that 42 was perfect for the time being, as it should be, as should 52 be, if i make it that far. at 52 i should be doing other things. more things. my face should be chiseled and my belly flat, and the blisters of technology-induced aggravation which regularly rise up from my gut in 2010 should, in 2020, be humorous memories. i would like to be off technology as completely as possible in 2020, though an absolute break is neither likely nor desirable. today my house of cards relies almost entirely on the public Internet, which is perilously ridiculous. some people in my life think i don‘t actually work or do anything but sit around and hurl emptied beer cans out on the fire escape. then they get to know me just a little bit and they find how untrue that is. either way, i do not care about these things until i confront the assumption that my time is not valuable.
but i ramble. skimble-skamble, ramble-gamble.
hours of film,
static images
burning time like a
cowboy rope,
how do static images burn time?
static imaginings,
idle objects,
clumps of undeveloped
negatives of the mind
devour time like the
mouth of a noose.
