The middle day the longest. Expect me home by ten tonight; I'll need to leave here within an hour. If I weren't content with so much solitude in the outpouring, this gig would still be astonishingly lone-some, and after all these years too, in which (it turns out) it is still possible, given work does not call, to go unsummoned indefinitely. Remember Mitch? Whose neighbor found him several days after his heart imploded? It was summer. When the work falls off and the people go away.
***
Would be: but isn't anymore, thankfully. I know a few others forced to turn there for company, and their sadness and panic at discovering a work community is a not an ethical animal but a political one, despite its best efforts. You get a thicker skin, you get irritated and a little despairing, and you forge your greater independence from the same experience you find available to you in a traffic jam. From where you're sitting, the bridge might arch right up into the sky and end there, and you find (in the greater scheme of things), given the relentless trail of taillights glowing (ineptly) in broad day: that would be okay.
***
Fitting, anyway. Though I'm always surprised we're all willing to settle for getting along as the measure. Me too. The word indifference makes me nervous for this reason. And disinterested, as well. They require so much qualifying, so much clarification of feeling and effort, where my interest in you is likely in my own best interest and according to my interests, where my disinterest is more likely a form of uninterest. Where my attachment to you is most recognizable in my attachment to myself.
***
My friend's imaginary halo: a nostalgia.
***
And everywhere mistaking art for people. I'm surprised, too, to discover I prefer art. That I prefer beauty, its orderedness, even when terrible. That I've defended my preference by asserting art has some kind of necessary relationship to teaching love, somewhere. But no. Not a substantial relationship, no. An accidental one. Why is it so difficult to remember?--That where there is love, there must also be a who. Not a generalized who--the political animal again--but a specific, touchable who. Not "people." You. Or again, we are only back to our work. Our making.
***
That's what I meant! Not arbitrary. Accidental.
***
