I am sitting in the far, far reaches of my apartment, in the bedroom, sitting in The Chair next to the heater and the air conditioner, both contraptions working on me, competing, one generating heat and the other blasting cold air at my face. The apocalypse could rage in the living room and I would not hear it. I am listening to Mahler’s 4th Symphony and typing mostly by the light of this computer screen, with help from a 99-cent clip-on light. I nearly ended that previous sentence with an irrelevant temporal flourish. I lazily came close to mentioning the length of time between now and the date I purchased that clip-on light. But no. I deferred to efficiency of expression, and I clipped from this monologue the irrelevance of how long ago this light entered my life.           I find myself frequently appending sentences with useless mentions of how long ago something happened or did not happen, and to stomp out that frivolous habit I bend back the spoon by eliminating all mention of dates from my litanies. I am not a fan of time to begin with, and I feel a special antipathy toward this tendency to self-referentialize by feebly impregnating remarks with the significance of artificial context — that context being the presumed importance of comments in the greater time horizon, the wider spectrum of experience, an expanse of time which, in fact, does nothing but confirm the vanquishment from history of the 99-cent clip-on light by which (partly, with the light of the computer screen) I type these words.           I woke up this morning and attempted to wash dishes, but instead cut myself in the hand, cut by the blade of a blender, the black muscle of my right hand dug into and bloodied by the Cuisinart that last saw action mixing popover batter. I am not clumsy but when these incidents occur I concern myself not with the pain or the gushing blood but with the stupidity. The dull movements of picking up the blender, unscrewing its base, then feeling the base slip and propel from my hand and then my hand, stupidly, reaching for the base (which contains the blade) and the blade sinking into the tough muscles. After bandaging it I found myself subconsciously avoiding use of my fifth finger while playing piano, and even while typing — a prestidigitational lipogram. Piano playing, while not most people’s idea of athleticism, is a more muscular act than pecking out words at these cheap plastic keys. Piano playing is a re-creative act, though, and in my exertions I find that re-creation is a simpler and less vulnerable movement to make with these hands than creation.           This little injury will fix itself soon enough. I heal quickly, but not since college have I been fully unable to play piano with one of my hands. I would go bananas if I lost the ability to play piano. I feel my inner sanctum lose some of its balance if I sit and play through music written for the left hand alone.           I skipped ahead to Mahler’s 5th Symphony, a work which I find comical and crude at times. Certain moments of purportedly highest drama in this work sound to me like Van Halen.           It is scattershot how memory works. I already forgot why, moments ago, the memory of a confused line cook at a college cafeteria passed through my mind. One Sunday afternoon, with nowhere else to go for food in that tiny, tiny town, I found myself in line behind 3 other people waiting to place orders from a friendly but hapless man assigned to work the grill. Everything confused him, and waiting in that line for 78 minutes felt then like those hours I experienced later in life (another concoction of relevance via temporal assignment) where rising from bed felt impossible, my body grimly locked in sleep from which I could not wake. The first moments of death must be this way.           Now I am hearing the Herbert Hamilton Harty Piano Concerto.           I had something more to say here. Something. This is a miniature form of exile, here in this corner, here in the confused combat between hot and cold. I had a moment of reaching under the zeitgeist this week. A review of a new publication of Flaubert’s letters described the author’s account of his stolid reaction to the death of a close relative. It woke me up, that brief quotation.