Is every day a beginning, or an end? The end of yesterday is today’s beginning. Or is the now the only true beginning? In my beginning is my end. I didn’t say that. Someone else said that.

Am I here or am I there? By my reckoning I am here but from your perspective I am there. I want to be always here but sometimes I have to be there, so I go there only to find that I am here again. How can I ever be there?

I’m feeling many things these weeks. Fear. Emptiness. Happiness at times. Nuclear winters storm inside me. Many times I’ve jolted my head to a side thinking there was someone standing behind me.

I’m reading more than just news. It is not a new observation but lately I’ve come to articulately recognize that so much of it is garbage. Journalism today is so much copy and paste what happened on TikTok, who got millions of views and why. A lot of humiliation and shaming. A lot of it is not good.

The quality stuff seems so out of context that I can’t take it seriously. I wanted to read about a waterfall of lava on the sun but I was still wiping gunk off my mind from umpteen articles about how astounded people are to learn the actual meaning behind the product name “WD-40”; or the real reason there’s a “fly” in men’s underwear; or the fact that there is a bear in the Toblerone logo. Why am I reading this? Why am I writing this? Is this word here, or is it there?

I am well into The Goldfinch, which a friend recommended on the basis of it being a great New York City novel. It opens in Amsterdam. I made it through the somewhat fascinating account of the (fictional) bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as described by a 13-year old who survived. Bodies everywhere, blood and stench, then in a moment he sees a hand sticking out of a wall. Just a hand, bloodied and dead; for all times forward he would see that hand any time a panhandler reached out to him for a handout.

Is there a catalog of those associations? Should every individual contribute to a central registry of objects or landmarks that invoke the memory of something else, something seen that cannot be unseen? In this case it was a dead hand sticking out of a wall that the author forever associated with panhandlers holding their hands out. I hope never to live with such a ghastly association but it reminds me how the sound of running water evokes a feeling that death is near, inevitable, and positively agreeable. I don’t know where that association came from, though, so it would be unusable in the central registry of associations such as the one that starts with the hand of a beggar and ends with a dead hand sticking out from a wall.

A central registry of these associations could reveal much, I think. But it might be impossible to form conclusions since so many of these associations would be unique, and deeply personal.