Words find residence and resonance, encountered, forgotten, reminded, astounded. You can think of a hundred things that would be safer to handle with vulnerable containers like mouths, eyes and brains than arrangements of letters, sounds or phonemes, and that’s before you get into pictures.
An all cylinder day, even with a bit of rain coming down every other half hour, and the light felt oddly flat in between either heavy cloud cover or just lost in swaths of rain drifting or hurtling down from above.
The roadway was lost against a field of late afternoon gray, bathed in waves of rain and chopped up spray from windblown vapor. If the car was going to veer out of its lane and into trouble, it should’ve gone and done it. But I got out and off the interstate and then home, and tomorrow I’m back at it.
After dropping off and returning a couple of books, I managed to pick up pictures from a drugstore after printing a particular form. Then came an inadvertent tour of a few post office facilities before I found one that would let me handle my business. Now, I wait for several weeks and see if everything falls just right.
Today was about blades and decisions, starting with the fill up of the gas tank and the trip over to the local hardware store and the decision against the multi-tool and the plan to visit the hardware store that led to a replacement of a knife I’ve missed for several months and the purchase of a screwdriver to install kitchen shelves.
It’s been one of those stretches where ten days feels like a few months, in part because of things feeding back on themselves, like how I’ve been spending those last few months, and in part from things exploding and imploding. Let’s see if a day or two, or some sleep, changes things, or feels like a half week’s rest or not.
Bad weather to go tooling around after people, but good weather to see the city anew from its watery edges. It was the third Wednesday in a row that I’d gone to a certain shop before my shift started.
It’s not that I haven’t been looking out the window recently. It’s just that I’ve been spending time looking out other windows at the place, or between other places in a vehicle or other vehicles? All of that too when I haven’t been looking at a screen, and all of that in addition to seeing.
Eventually I got to talk to the person I was supposed to see but it took several minutes to be scanned and searched, let alone to convince the folks at the door to let me in. For a minute I was torn between the terror of being taken seriously and the tedium of trying not to be a threat, which made the reason I was there all the funnier to me.
My superstition about a thing today was mostly about not watching, which made going over to a big box store to see if anyone else was all the more delightful when I found nothing but nature footage and commercials for streaming television services and many ads for TV screen features. The only better thing was the joyful comfort of seeing familiar faces and hearing them sing karaoke at a historic music venue I’d never visited before.
