. . .

Getting into an airplane cabin in a matter of hours and going south. And any place south is close to home. I'm taking the desert with me since we happen to be in one now, which is easier done when the sun is out. I think the sun will be out. As will I. Georgia Georgia.

I'm taking running shoes.

I hope I see you when I get there.

I'm across the street at the Marriott, remember?


***

AWP Conference 2007, Atlanta GA

Con Tinta Celebration

Friday, March 2
6:30-8:00 p.m.
Mitra Restaurant
(Directions from Conference Hotel to Mitra Restaurant are below)
818 Juniper Street NE, Atlanta GA 30308
www.mitrarestaurant.com
404-875-5515

Open Buffet * Cash Bar * Free Admission * Public is Invited
Featuring an award presentation to Judith Ortiz Cofer
With a reading by Poets featured in The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry
(Camino del Sol, University of Arizona Press) edited by Francisco Aragón

From: Hilton Atlanta, AWP Conference Hotel: 255 Courtland St Ne Atlanta, GA 30303-1265 To: Mitra Restaurant, Con Tinta Celebration Venue 818 Juniper St Ne Atlanta, GA 30308-1312 Driving Directions:
1. Start out going SOUTH on COURTLAND ST NE toward HARRIS ST NE. (.3 miles)
2. Turn LEFT onto HARRIS ST NE. (0.12 miles)
3. Turn LEFT onto PIEDMONT AVE NE. (1.21 miles)
4. Turn LEFT onto 7TH ST NE. (0.09 miles)
5. Turn LEFT onto JUNIPER ST NE. (0.11 miles)
6. End at 818 Juniper St Ne Atlanta, GA 30308-1312 US
Total Estimated Time: 4 minutes; Total Distance: 1.55 miles

............................................................................................................
CON TINTA is a coalition of cultural activists (Chicano/Latino poets and writers) who believe in affirming a positive and pro-active presence in American literature. We come together in the spirit of intellectual exchange, of creating dialogue with our communities and beyond, of recognizing our literary and social histories, and of establishing alliances with other cultural and political organizations. Contact Info: Con Tinta, Attn. Richard Yañez P.O. Box 1025, Santa Teresa NM 88008 E-mail: theclica@hotmail.com www.continta.org (under construction)
..............................................................................................................


***

&.

***

. .

No really I hate packing.

***

&.

***

week nine

"The first thing I found was this. What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see..."

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

***

&.

***

. . . . . .

"It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus. The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive..."

--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

***

Arm day. &.

***

. . . . . .

I thought about it a lot while in the shower or driving to school: what to do? I guess I knew all along but I wanted to be sure so in the end I said well I don't know, what do You want? And You said (swift as a blade) I want that thing's head on a platter.

***

Part of today's translation transcription work, a gorgeous enigmatic passage on inspiration from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.


— Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.— If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one's system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down, that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form,—I never had any choice. A rapture whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in a flood of tears, now the pace quickens involuntarily, now it becomes slow; one is altogether beside oneself, with the distinct consciousness of subtle shudders and of one's skin creeping down to one's toes; a depth of happiness in which even what is most painful and gloomy does not seem something opposite but rather conditioned, provoked, a necessary color in such a superabundance of light; an instinct for rhythmic relationships that arches over wide spaces of forms—length, the need for a rhythm with wide arches, is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension ... Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity ... The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor, everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors (—"Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you: for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to every truth. Here the words and word-shrines of all being open up before you; here all being wishes to become word, all becoming wishes to learn from you how to speak—"). This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years in order to find anyone who could say to me, "it is mine as well."


***

&.

***

. . . .

Remarkable, faces and carnations both recognizably faces and carnations without color or distinct form. Image of images and a reflection: so far mediated, and still an image of a face is still a face, a reflection of a flower a flower. The difference between image and thing-itself seems to me more theoretical than experiential, here at least, more interesting than frustrating, more pleasurable than traumatizing. More subconscious than conscious. The conscious mind simply latches on to what it knows (is familiar with) and begins to nurse and suckle. Both.

***

The thaw here makes big promises--green grass beneath the melting snow--but the weather prophets say we're in for another ice storm.

***

The unidentifiable noise upstairs, morning and night like a grinding fan, like a regular groan--too regular for consciousness, too deep for pleasure--? Took me awhile. Tina's girlfriend sleeping most of the day. Snoring.

***

&.

***

. . . .

For Ann--

--who wants to know six (!) things about me you might not otherwise know. Six "oddities." So I'll add them as they occur to me:

1. I used to grow African violets. Under florescent lights. Shelves of them, wick-watered and show-purchased, and cultivated under the sometimes controversial guidance provided by my subscription to African Violet Magazine and the few books available on the plant and its ilk. This was before Wikipedia and the Amazon monster, so information had to be genuinely and determinedly sought. I was young and in love. It was not the blossoms (as for most growers and show-ers) but the leaves. The leaves were my beloveds (and so erotic--erect with purple undersides and downy and fluid-firm and sweet). The tiniest lapse in care scars the leaves and a single full-grown leaf is many months of vigilant care. Lose one leaf and the symmetry is lost, and really symmetry is everything, is the point, because the plant is fussy. It wants lopsidedness: no cold air, no warm or cold drafts, no cold water, no wet leaves or water spots or wet crowns. Seventy-five degrees. Bright light, no direct light. And fourteen hours of light a day to produce flowers. --Yet all you need is water and light. Maybe a little earth. Some attentiveness. (Not so different from photography.)

2. I can't eat salmon. It's too human. Too genital.

3. After completing my Catholic sacraments at six--baptism, confirmation, first communion--I was taken out of the Church and placed instead into a series of nondenominational born-again worship communities. I became an evangelist in the Pentecostal Charismatic tradition between the ages of eight and fourteen. I had also by that time become an atheist. Was in church three days a week--twice on Sunday--not including Bible study. I owned my own tambourine, was baptized three times in the San Francisco River (a thing we did every spring), was surrounded by friends in my age group who'd received the gift of tongues and prophecy and healing or who'd been called to the ministry. And I attended long after my mother had fallen off, still atheist to the core. I kept waiting for something to happen, for Jesus to seem like a god, for the embarrassment to lift. It didn't. So, when my pastor took me aside and called me vain (it's true), I left it behind for a more orthodox agnosticism which served me well through the making of most of my graduate school misery.

4. Rabbits seriously freak me out. They're not cute. They're rodent, fertile, strange, and where I come from, sometimes rabid. Not like skunks but kind of like skunks, and bigger. When the Easter bunny got flogged I was secretly thrilled.

5. My mother wore a key around her belly while she was pregnant with me to fend off the effects of the eclipse she watched while standing in the driveway with neighbors and my father. Still a tiny chink of my right earlobe is missing. Still I remember watching the eclipse with them, the story the neighbor girl Anna told of the Spider Woman weaving her sack for the sun.

6. &.


***

. . .

Quiet here but only because I'm feeling contemplative. I'm reading. I'm translating in my head (though I am not the translator) word to word, syntax to syntax, punctuation mark to punctuation mark, paragraph to paragraph, voice to page, Marie-Dominique Philippe's Philosophie de L'art, which I read in little bits of French and transcribe as Brother Nathan translates it aloud in English, often again and again at a click and drag of the mp3 dot. For the sake of accuracy. Which seems absurd. So far, commentaries from Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, all in the first pages, all translated from Greek and German to French, now turned back again to the language I think in. Write here. Dream, converse, exclaim in. What can I know of this book? Given the layers of thoughtful refraction? The refractory gaps opened up in the process? I've refrained from pulling down my French dictionary. When I do, all will be lost to the divide between where time is infinite. Where no project is completed.

***

"How can we understand this relationship between the foundation and that which is founded, between experience and inspiration?"

***

I think this is my first Ash Wednesday. I think so.

So, I'm going to get ashed.

***

&.

***

. .

&.
For there is hope.

***

week eight

“it can come in happiness and in exaltation and it can come upon the poet in the form of [?] which forces him to fight again and again against his own deficiencies.”

***

"Even just saying the name Jesus out loud makes me cringe. So many self-righteous, mean-spirited, and even truly evil people have cracked the name of Jesus like a whip that I'm ready to duck every time I hear it." --Kristin Ohlson, Stalking the Divine

***

&.

***

Oh, and N? The book's not bad. The narratives are sometimes too slow, lackluster, especially in light of what feels ought to be at the center of the book's poignancy but avoids itself: the depth of the search, which remains persistently too literal, too surface, all beauty of wimples and habits and poverty and mortification, all naivete about anything mystical or theological. She has no mind for mystery. Even her prose: rather lucid than lyric. But she often voices--wittingly and throughout--and this is something--what I've thought or felt most of my life in my worst moments, in my most skeptical, ungenerous, simple-minded, ignorant, apathetic, and self-congratulatory meanness. As when reading de Man with conviction.

***

. . . . . . .

"Sin is a lack of love."

***

Scariest thing I've ever seen. Also the scariest thing I've ever seen.

***

&.

***

. . . . . .

Ghost in the machine: click through the image and you see her face to face: quashed smile in a red dress: eyes made up for summer: carnival beads, gold hoops: the bottle said "Honey": and is that who lives in the red light branches and brick: in the blur: in the ice a strappy thing made for sand and sun?

I had nothing to do with it. I'm telling you, there are ghosts.

***

Dinner with Eric with long wonderful roving conversation ... childhood stories, fathers and mothers, teaching gigs, Pentecostalism, Philadelphia, fettuccine, good ways to do laundry, Midwestern wind, road trips ... our table an island among chairs put up on tables as the restaurant closed up around us.

***

Mysteriously as she appeared she is gone again.

***

&.

***

. . . . .

Light rakes across the snow. The wind filled in yesterday's footprints to the street, and I'd have missed it if I hadn't looked out the back window when I did. The neighbors still leave their cats crying in the cold, negative 6 degrees now. I made a phone call about it to animal authorities but no. Romulus paces and cries with them.

***

Just to say I really miss the Jordan and Ali photograph production at Flickr and the robot. Whahappened?

***

. . . .

I'll be staying at the Marriott in Atlanta. If you're going to AWP, I'd like to see you, Okay? Drop me a note before we get there. Send me your cell, I'll send you mine. I'm feeling sociable.

***

Bathtub epiphany: a memory, really, that Zali was most disappointed when the guy turned out to be a pompous ass. That's what he called him: "a pompous ass." And he was furious--I've never seen Zali angry besides that--and not for his sake but for my sake--and I thought at the time, if this guy only knew... But knew what? Would it change the guy's pompous asshood that Zali is utterly amazing and that everyone, beautiful brilliant people, adore him? Of course not. And I remember being relieved too, a little grateful, after searching for a way to describe that experience and not being able to say quite what that Zali (I bow to you, dear poet) had words immediately. He didn't say asshole. He said ass.

Precisely.

It was the same night he said "ass too is nothing." But that was another context.

***

Fortune cookie:

"Come back later... I am sleeping. (yes cookies need their sleep, too)"

***

. . .

(TSE, NYC 2007)



Valentine from Thomas Sayers Ellis. --Right back at you, baby. Happy.

***

Heart foot.

***

And so much thanks and big love to the makers of Copper Nickel who've put together some stunningly beautiful books filled with stunningly beautiful work. Jake Adam York, especially you.

***

. .

Feel as if I've made a wrong turn and can't find my way back. You're okay I say to my head and my head says sure sure but I can't account for the pain thrumming in there or the things it's telling me to do. Woke to the windows rattling in their casements, the snow blowing against the glass like sand, and then there was no longer sleep to be had. I wanted to see the snow haze out the distant lights. I wanted to deal with my head where there is also snow hazing out light. In the dream a gallery of tiny photographs taken by a dead woman, all in yellow and blue. I got up and took Suzanne's advice: I put a chicken in the oven.

***

"Don't they make a nice pair?" I have to stop thinking this way. Deboned the chicken. Now I identify with the chicken.

***

&.

***

week seven

The field.

***

Blinding headache this morning--it seems I'm staying home sick.

***

Here we go again:

ACCUMULATIONS WILL RANGE FROM 5 TO 8 INCHES NORTHWEST OF THE ILLINOIS RIVER... WITH 8 TO 12 INCHES FROM THE ILLINOIS RIVER SOUTHEAST TO NEAR THE I- 70 CORRIDOR. LOCALLY HEAVIER AMOUNTS CAN BE EXPECTED IN A NARROW BAND... WHICH IS MOST LIKELY TO DEVELOP LATE TONIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW MORNING

***

&.

***

. . . . . . .

"What is present to me is what has hold on my becoming."

***

Meanwhile I had an astonishingly beautiful day. The single digits of the last weeks finally surrendered to a balmy 30, the streets thawed, and the driveway frozen lake cracked wide open melting to an archipelago slush by afternoon. I wore one coat, only one, the old cashmere one I save for important days, and put the snow boots aside for thin-soled Italian-made loafers, and my wool sweater aside for velvet. I wore the scarf D gave me for my birthday--of iridescent melon silk and black embroidery all the way from Turkey--and I drove to the priory for mass with a handmade rosary in my pocket.

***

All of late morning I sat in the chapel in the smell of incense and in the overcast light and thought of people close to me and watched a group of fourteen year-old boys on retreat suffer the mass, one chewing his thumb, one turning back every few minutes to catch his friend's eye, one kicking his shoes absently and forgetting to kneel while the Eucharist was prepared until the boy behind him tapped him on the back, all grinning a bit and mocking when two were chosen to bring the gifts forward. They came to life, animated at once, when we shook hands and wished each other peace: my favorite part of the mass also.

***

After, while the chapel cleared and the monks and guests sat down for lunch, Brother Nathan and I drove to Peoria with a brown bag meal of cheese and apples and nuts to see the seventy-two Ansel Adams photographs on exhibit at the Lakeview Museum, his invitation two weeks ago when I last brought out the camera at the priory: I'm going--come with me.

***

I thumbed through a book called The Negative and marveled at what he knew of light.

***

He said let's try out your four-wheel drive so I can show you our field com'on be adventurous, keep the car rolling. So I did, and we parked a few feet short of the big Cat sleeping on the ridge of the bowl behind it where red clods of turned earth came up through the snow and the snow turned orange in the sun going down through soft cloud. He said here, and waved his arms, think of kites and of kids playing soccer, picnics, feasts, every one of us sitting on the grassy knolls with the gospel being preached and a basketball hoop there at the far end, a place for the community at our community, and all of this wonderful silence now amazing when soon it will be filled with thunder.

***

He said I know you feel good about being around the Brothers but if there is something more specific we can do for you ask okay? I said you're translating M. D. Philippe's Philosophie de l'arte into English--you're looking for a typist you mentioned sometime back? Yes, he said, I am translating it on tape during the few free moments I have: when I drive or travel. I said: I want to read it, let me type and transcribe, I might be lousy at it but let me try. He said if you give me sixteen minutes of listening and transcribing and need to give it up that will be more gift than the book will have had.

***

My thin heeled shoes, his sandals and socks: a warm windless thirty-two. He knocked the snow off his shoes before getting into the car again and spent some time at it. Lovingly. I almost said: please, we're all friends here. The snow included.

***

. . . . . .

It does. It needs to take up a lot of space and time in every direction and to want to know and to want to want and to labor, proliferate, multiply, from all the angles of its rooms and views. It is not a thing of tinkering; it is not a thing to sell. (--Though it is capable of whatever it pleases, prostitution, colonization, machinery, cleverness, heartbreak, i.e.) It is a thing of wishing, a plea, a little awe and trembling, some praise, some gratitude, some psaltering, some play by the foot of the master, some hubris too, some ritual unfolding of leaves. For me. So much so that invocation sounds like prayer to me--that I can't anymore hear it otherwise. And elegy too: prayer. Most poems, I suppose: surely all of my own. And maybe that's my fault for keeping my Milton close ever since. And maybe I am small-minded, would make sacred all the things around me that seem sacred because it is convenient for me, compulsive of me, and what's wrong with that is that I think I know better, was certainly educated otherwise in the great secular traditions of empiricism and enlightenment. But rather the repercussions of the sacristies I build all day while passing through my day than to stand in the crossroads by the mailbox waiting for a letter to move me--or for despair of one to keep me waiting. Keep me in doubt. I have done my waiting--(suspending judgement)--I have wasted time (on selective hearing). All of it, every second of it, is annunciation, not just sweetness, flight. So I would say, if it were mine to give, the world is your book--write it as you see fit. But it is not alone your book not my book or their book. "Of making many books there is no end," and so I had hoped you would see (I mean agree with me) what small petty weary work it is to get a word in a book compared to the first work of resonance. The great work is resonance.

***

I thought it was work we would do together, resonance.

***

Note to self: "the great work"--there is your hierarchy.

***

"...religion is primarily about the obsessive-compulsive element in human nature enacting controlled scenarios that are supposedly the most important and most meaningful parts of life—but finally the defining material element of these scenarios is their empty ritualistic quality..."

And yet "arbitrary" seems incapable of accounting for the stubbornness of codification (and hierarchy). The hardwiredness of it--of compulsion, of obsession. Really do you mean to say the meaning of life is compulsion? Dark indeed. It's only a good argument for more Prozac nationhood.

--And I'm convinced that to wield the superstitious stick against the crowd is not subversive but deeply codified and profoundly canonical. Before Rome, right?

***

Precisely Hume. “Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are…the true sources of superstition”:

The mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions, proceeding either from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy and melancholic disposition, or from the concurrence of all these circumstances. In such a state of mind, infinite unknown evils are dreaded from unknown agents; and where real objects of terror are wanting, the soul, active to its own prejudice, and fostering is predominant inclination, finds imaginary ones, to whose power and malevolence it sets no limits. --David Hume, "On Superstition and Enthusiasm"

***

. . . . .

Thinking about going to Puerto Rico with Herman for spring break. Congratulate him: he's about to accept a position at a fine university. Thank you fine university.

***

. . . .

For Lyle (who knew exactly what I meant):

With the Shell of a Hermit Crab

Lugete, O Veneres Cupidinesque. --Catullus

This lovely little life whose toes
Touched the white sand from side to side,
How delicately no one knows,
Crept from his loneliness, and died.

From deep waters long miles away
He wandered, looking for his name,
And all he found was you and me,
A quick life and a candle flame.

Today you happen to be gone.
I sit here in the raging hell,
The city of the dead, alone,
Holding a little empty shell.

I peer into his tiny face.
It looms too huge for me to bear.
Two blocks away the sea gives place
To river. Both are everywhere.

I reach out and flick the light.
Darkly I touch his fragile scars,
So far away, so delicate,
Stars in a wilderness of stars.

--James Wright, 1977

***

"Why is there no time left to adore each other?"

***

"The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of the credulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to be productive of the most salutary lessons.

One view of the subject will teach us a useful pride in the abundance of our faculties. Without pride man is in reality of little value. It is pride that stimulates us to all our great undertakings. Without pride, and the secret persuasion of extraordinary talents, what man would take up the pen with a view to produce an important work, whether of imagination and poetry or of profound science, or of acute and subtle reasoning and intellectual anatomy? It is pride in this sense that makes the great general and the consummate legislator, that animates us to tasks the most laborious, and causes us to shrink from no difficulty, and to be confounded and overwhelmed with no obstacle that can be interposed in our path."

--William Godwin, from the preface to Lives of the Necromancers: An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages Who Have Claimed for Themselves or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others

***

And the bullshit flags went up?
Of course they did.
What do they call that? Irreconcilable differences?
Yeah. That.

***

&.

***

. . .

"But everything is so far mediated that sublimity is now impossible."

***

I refute you thus:






("stars in a wilderness of stars")






***

&.

***

. .

***

Three to six inches.

***

Have spent the morning ordering books for the Spring Shelley course. Have been nervously weighing the reliability of exam copies from Oxford (which last term never did arrive) against the Amazon monster. Have been thinking of spending library money to update our holdings and to have the course texts available in the stacks. Our library doesn't even own a copy of The Last Man--which apparently I could read online if I were really really driven. Which is very very wrong.

***

Is it true books for this job are tax deductible?

***

No I hadn't meant to do my taxes today but I guess I just did. What the hell it was free. Which I guess says something depressing about my income.

***

&.

***

week six

Now negative seven feels like negative nineteen with a high sometime today of five feeling like negative seven, relentless since early January with no sign of letting up towards a mild thirty in the next ten days. I am fragile in this. One life ended, another begins. Or the same life arriving with lucidity: boredom: work without pleasure: loneness: nothing much to see so why see? I miss H. I miss walking outdoors with my hood down and the sun warming my head or driving around with music pouring out of the open windows. I miss colors running together like running water. The gutters running. The sound of thaw.

***

Hot water pipe in the kitchen? Frozen of course.

***

Impress me.

***

&.

***

. . . . . . .

&.

***

. . . . . .

&.

***

. . . . .

And:

***

Not enough much help with and.

***

Spring 2007, English 380F
MWF 3rd Hour, Franco

The Shelley Circle:
a story of Mr. and Mrs. Shelley

Kicked out of Oxford for advocating Humean atheism?
Married to a dull-witted prudish woman who refuses the free love advances of your best friend and who requires you to live with her tyrannical sister? Estranged from your inheritance and disowned by your father for stupidly eloping with the second Harriet you’ve ever loved?

But then along comes Mary.

“There can be no doubt that Shelley was entirely swept off his feet by the sudden vision of the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft: physical passion, brotherly affinity, spiritual identity burst upon him like a thunderclap. After the … naggings of unsatisfactory fatherhood and the tramels of the disappointed inheritance, it was as if he could start his youth all over again, a dazzling second chance. Mary offered fresh, 16-year-old sexuality combined in the most extraordinary way with the precocious intellectual flair of her Godwinian upbringing. She was both naïve and knowing, both flesh and spirit, burning with a youth and intelligence which blazed out all the more hypnotically against the gloomy, hopeless, complicated collapse of Shelley’s married relationship with Harriet. With only momentary hesitations and misgivings, he fled from the shadow into the sun. Love was free, and to promise for ever to love the same woman was absurd.” —Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit

WE’LL READ THEM BOTH—LETTERS, JOURNALS, LITERARY WORKS, ACCOUNTS BY FRIENDS, BIOGRAPHIES—SIDE BY SIDE.

***

&.

***

. . . .

Snow flurries, steam venting from the house, twenty degrees feels like ten, and this the warmest part of our coming week. Saturday seven feels like negative four, Monday two feels like negative nine, and the wind is still kicking around at 10 to 25 mph making every room drafty and every outdoor excursion from here to the car regrettable. No really I thought my twelve winters had prepared me for winter. I'm doing all the things I've done before, wearing thermals, sweaters and boots, a down jacket beneath my big wool coat and still. I have a dream.

***

Meanwhile, not that it much interests you, but three weeks after getting back to the gym in a fairly serious way and yes fatigue is setting in. The good fatigue. The kind that brings sleep and forgettable dreams. I'm late getting up today. I'm okay with that.

***

&.

***