Wednesday November 1, 2017

Embroidered pulse signals. 24/7 thermals and flannels. A friend who I run into from time to time at Goodwill, and whose wife is one of Sarah’s colleagues, gave me two blocks of imported Scottish cheese out in the parking lot the other day. (And no, that’s not street slang for a new kind of drug. I’m talking about cheese here, people!) There are sometimes whole days when events like the above make up the full extent of my non-work-related interactions with others. Sarah’s bummed about having received so few trick-or-treaters yesterday. I sat in the side yard absorbing brown, orange, and yellow leaves atop the patchy remains of a lawn. Birds, bells, crickets, neighbors. The bark of a neighbor’s dog. Squirrels courted one another in the branches above my head, the female shaking her tail and leading the male on a chase. My brother’s girlfriend texted Sarah and I from Brooklyn; a truck had fatally attacked bikers in New York, she said, but she and my brother were safe. Subway riders sat uneasily beside one another in costume. I imagine it was hard, trying to play-act a nightmare while in the midst of one. I enjoyed sitting on the front stoop, though, listening to the zombie shuffle of children’s footsteps as night fell. And we did end up meeting a few more of our neighbors. “This is what — essentially a diary?” I ask myself. To which I reply, “Quit bullying me. Back off.” Am I allowing others to watch me as I lower myself into a de-conditioned vortex? I have incurred a debt which I can never repay. But why dwell on the absolute horizon, the structure that bounds in on all sides one’s field of action? Why not focus instead on papers one will never get around to writing? “America” has always been a settler-colonialist fort, white settlers descending like a plague, a wedge driven between the land and its native people. How might we avenge this — the crime of our very existence? One has to countenance this in the “new frontier” mythos that pervades the hippie counterculture’s embrace of psychedelics in the 1960s and 1970s. Then again, Leslie Fiedler responded to the psychedelic revolution in a rather different political register, regarding it instead as “the red man’s revenge” and as a “reunion of white and ‘other.'” His argument is one with which I’ll need to engage as I develop my theory.