I woke up thinking I should spend this day writing. Typing. Stringing words together in effluvious wellsprings of vapid array.
Looking out the window I see a young woman walking her dog. Another person of (from this distance) indeterminate gender walks past, offering no comment or acknowledgement of the mundane and forgettable sight of the dog-walker, nor the dog’s nose nuzzling a particularly fascinating spot on the sidewalk.
It’s not as easy as it used to be. Or is it? Observing and mentally cataloging the world that passes, or that I pass by, seems trivial, and common. I had taken to recording everything, from hours-long video of long walks to screen-recording my endless left and right swipes on dating apps. Must document everything for the hard, stolid times to come; for when emotions freeze and we find ourselves in self-sentenced prisons, locked but not confined, trapped but free to leave.
When the hands of this reckoning secure themselves around our bodies once and for all there would be little left for us save for the evidence we left, the trails and visual detritus that future forensic anthropologists, perhaps from other races or species, will scrutinize and slave over, trying to understand the puzzling machinations of our daily lives.
What conclusions would this analysis settle on? When future societies discover the maps of my movements will analysts understand why I cross streets at times and places which make no sense given my ultimate destination? Will they surmise that I avoid passing too close to certain places because people there do not like me anymore? Will they have only the inbox portion of an email correspondence which ended a 15-year friendship? Will my phone’s call recording function have failed when the anguished follow-up conversation occurred?
What gets saved? What rots and wrestles with itself, suffocating in its own breathless vomit, in the twisting winds of forgotten everything?
Another woman walking her dog passes by outside. She sneezed into a napkin before picking the dog’s shit up off the sidewalk.
Yesterday I walk 9.8 miles after waking far earlier than usual. I had not seen 6am, save for nights I stayed awake until that hour, for a long time. I went to church but my patience snapped within just a couple of minutes, and I left. A desultory trek up to 20th Road in Astoria had me at the Lawrence Family Cemetery, a private yard in the middle of a residential neighborhood. I’ve never been within that space do not know anyone who has, as far as I know.
I picked up prescription refills for a drug I rarely take and a rosacea cream I no longer need.
I briefly chatted with an ex-girlfriend who, though fully vaccinated, wears a mask everywhere. I honestly did not recognize her until she was well into her second sentence of saying hello and asking usual questions about life, liberty, and the meaning of things. I was not feeling chatty, and used the unexpected rainfall and a mythical reason that I had to get going as an excuse to end this little encounter. My real reason for moving on was that she appeared to be waiting to meet someone and if that person was who I suspected I did not want to be present upon their arrival.
I’ve been wanting to move, not to another apartment or house, but through space and time. I want to move through centuries, through unbuilt hallways and invisible doors where future and past existences wash my body and cook my mind. Why can’t I fuck everything at once? Why can’t I offer mercy to the condemned in the same moment as a young boy unexpectedly discovers I was the source of hundreds of mysterious telephone calls he received while riding a bus to Cairo?
If I can be sitting at this desk, naked and masturbating furiously in between typing these sentences, why can I not also be simultaneously present at the future coronation of an omnipotent queen whose legacy and influence are felt centuries before her birth? Where is the rule of temporal entropy that forbids such a union of activity?
The bleat goes on. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I may head for the streets again, as has become my religion. I walk, often to the exclusion of doing anything else with each precious gift of a day. Yesterday’s 9.8 miles felt like a duty, a responsibility and a cure for any ailments that might creep up on this inferior vessel that houses my spirit and soul to the exclusion of other beings or objects. Or does it? If a portion of my consciousness inhabits a bag of computer cables, or a soap dish with a fermented bar of Lava soap, how would I know?
I am going to give in to the temptation of the outdoor, even with the threat of rain. I cannot sit still.
