Last night I wrote ’til my hands hurt.

I begrudgingly drew upon my life experiences, which seem insignificant to me, but which can tangentially summon observations on the nature of things, or so I came to believe in my self-satisfied pomposities. I suppose that leveraging one’s sense of self-importance is not entirely a bad thing.

I think I look at life, my life, and my experiences, as nothing new. Once I’ve done something, said something, thought something, then there it is, out there, done. What’s said is said, what’s done is done. If I said it then you can say it, and in fact you might as well have said it. If I snapped a picture of something then you can do it, too. Everything done is done.

The only “New”, then, is the unspoken, the unspeakable, the unarticulatable stuff of poetical, philosophical, and even biblical cliché.

I used to have superstitions about the wind. Strong breezes, for a time, seemed always to punctuate milestones, talk of milestones, or even just fantasies about reaching life’s plateaus.

A friend and I stood in the lobby of a concert hall when he told me that his parents had separated. In that moment the front doors of the hall opened and a strong gust of wind blew over us. That, we decided, was a moment of symbolic portent. I can not remember when I stopped noting the gusts and breezes as they embraced those notable moments of life, filling a realm in which words had no power.

I have always loved the wind. The wind is sensuous but not sexual, like a hug from a parent or the head of a stranger landing on my shoulder as he falls asleep next to me on a crowded bus or train. I like to simply watch the wind rampage through foliage and lawn furniture. Last week, in the wind-tunnel between two buildings, a single sheet of paper spiraled up, up, up, how high would it go, I stupidly asked. How high? It rose higher than a 6-story building before suddenly vanishing into a tall tree, yanked out of sight like a kite pulled back to the ground. I am looking at that tree right now, the tree into which the paper twirled with a muscular lopsidedness. All papers get trapped in that tree, I think, and when the accounts of these months are written the academics in charge of creating history might do well to climb that tree and capture all the parchment snared therein, for there would be the literal truth.