I got up early, hoping to beat the rush at the first of the day’s rains. There was enough time for me to make it to the donut shop over in Noe Valley and back before starting my shift. Empty streets were empty all the way through the Mission and uphill, the car windshield got lightly spritzed and the shop clerk was generous.

It wasn’t a dream, but it had its own logic: memory playing back on a loop, narrative laying out battles between good and evil with high stakes; familiar faces not met in person in months or even years, changed by time or age or the perspective of light moving on a large screen before a roomful of people who knew or didn’t know exactly how it all went down.

You undo the work you watched someone set up because it was done wrong, but neither you nor the person doing it at the time knew that. It’s not even you undoing the work, because you’re hiring someone else and it’s been overseen anew this time. Anyhow, it’s done now, with some promising stripped back version awaiting your hands. Did I say your hands? Ah, well.

I don’t mind being in motion. I don’t mind stopping. But in between, all the little making of decisions, the fine tuning and steering, the built-in transactions it takes to toggle between states of being, that’s what distracts and drains and does me right in.

Errand after errand, marveling at random religious proselytizers, spices and beverages that changed history, timing on traffic lights thrown off by median mendicants, immobile and immobilized shanties along roadways, towels for pets, toys for other pets, a little drycleaning and a lot of time to contemplate and condense rocketry and relationships into song.

Some reading, some music, an exterior jaunt weighed and deliberated over before being rejected, with a split between recent comedians and old talk show segments, made up most of the day. The cat and I left each other alone, me to my language drill and her to her bird watching, and the world outside and the weather overhead to a day’s distant indifference.

There’s no magic pathway to dressed in black dancefloor redemption, no distracted wandering off a soundstage into an office casual ouroborotic rehearsal in the round. Not only can’t one step in the same river twice, one ain’t supposed to. Some things aren’t just impossible: they’re also wrong.

I’m pretty sure there’s something I’ve been Getting Wrong, the kind of thing I have to pretty much fix first by reaching the point where I’m more Tired Of It. I may not know exactly what to do, but I’m feeling fairly certain about what to Stop Doing.

Tuesday? Tacos. Sitting with a friend, doing the remembering-when, talking about important stuff and then deciding on dessert, trying to count how many movies got seen last year, and how other poorly scripted portrayals are currently doing.

Just about a decade following me around, backpack to bag, apartment to room, desk after shelf after floor, dodging drinks and connecting me with the worlds beyond, precarious yet sturdy, and soon scattered to the elements and perhaps back into someone else’s arms anew.