Musical Oblongata --

Painting by Ilya Repin

The surface of the earth is musical; I noticed this earlier when a painterly woman that was sitting on a bench wearing red high heels looked back at me, or maybe that was my beating heart that erupted into the surface of the earth—a tiny earthquake. I will keep telling myself this, keep shaking hands with miracles. Ponderings: “Chess is a game of understanding, and not of memory.” Brings to mind “STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS // nobody reads poetry nowadays // it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad” (Nicanor Parra). This is almost as silly (a most delicately-horrible term to use in this case, perhaps) as Hitler’s madness in thinking that he was a Christian. There is a delay in our heroic contendors, Andante by Shostakovich, anti-monumental sounds. Today, could’ve danced with Yogini, pressed into the wool of my sweater, tethered into “excuse me, like to dance?”-contemplation. Freeze Frame. “Potential” freezes. Out of sight, your love (“whom do you speak of?” , never to return to the surface. My pea

-ce, hints of relics, “I’d like to touch it first.” Thumb and index fingers together, afterwards. Walking through a hallway, the light indicated surveillance equipment. Some days I feel like I am shrinking to the size of a keyhole. Thinking of many-colored centuries. My camera laughed at me today. It said: “I would like to become what I was created to do, but my DNA is in knots. Why do you grin like that?”

While discussing my photographic experimentation to V. a few weeks ago, she listened intently, but my theatrical-tongue is always in knots whenever I speak to people, uncertain if they actually care to know, or if they are merely humoring me, and maybe this is mental-math for over-observation, but she sd, “Derrick, have you ever thought of modeling?” Moi: “Oh, please! . . . I hope you are just humoring me. The only modeling I do is with claythings and Play-doh and whatever else I can bend.”

Found this: “You can cut the bread off their sandwich, write critical appreciations and walk their mother’s dog and they’re still gonna treat you like “the hired help.” ” Not sure where. It’s like going through battle and the only thing left is an axe-handle. (Yi-Fu Tuan: “Strange to think that the question “Who am I?” can be answered by a landscape.” )

The word for echo is Pockadunkquaywayle. O, pitter-patter!—

(“[4] It was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the shore, and there was quite an echo from them, but when I was shouting in order to awake it, the Indian reminded me that I should scare the moose, which he was looking out for, and which we all wanted to see. The word for echo was Pockadunkquaywayle.” [from The Maine Woods, by Henry Thoreau, 1864])

There is a “poofy” bush somewhere out there that looks like a damaged sandwich. I met a girl named Abby the other day at Starbucks. We spoke of many things. She has been searching for a trench coat. She said: “I’ve been looking for a trench coat. Something extremely obnoxious.”

A thought arose last night: Vegetarians have beef with beef.

Night, oh, covers me, seemingly circumvently.