I appreciate the weather, I appreciate your time and I appreciate
that you’re pretty chill, that you won’t conflate this yawn
with an actual commentary on whatever it is you’re saying.
I can’t rollerskate. I wake up at dawn rolled between covers
and my two children. That moment when your child discovers
they like dancing and listening to music, like laying in the dark
alone with headphones on. The hawk hovers for a moment,
then flies on. The beauty of car parks at sunset. I embark
on an adventure to put things away. This concept of place
that keeps returning to kick my ass, as if every place weren’t
many places and many trajectories. I brace myself for a day
that’s already past with its own weird grace, the grace inherent
in any space of time. Trevor says Levi Strauss’ concept of the
mytheme is impressive and bogus. What if the Sermon
on the mount was in a valley? It definitely wasn’t in a cave,
I say, but that too is undetermined. Brain ways move much
slower than the speed of light. I smile at a random person
because she smiles at me. She is not a robot, she is not AI
or a deep fake in the large language model race which worsens
with every capitalist incentive. I don’t deny using Chat GPT
to ideate. I am compromised. I am not implying anything,
I’m saying it. I have never seen a lapwing. My brother
Bryan says I should go back to China. No more two-day train
rides across the country sitting next to bags of garlic, before
I was a mother, I mean before I grew two babies and two extra
organs to feed them in my womb. That’s what a placenta is.
I complain about work but I am lucky, have attained the kind
of employment I used to dream about, but not the hacienda
I still dream about. I’m always a little surprised to wake up
In Washington, D.C., which is not the TV version of America
The TV version of Washington, D.C. is usually Baltimore. Coco
picks buttercups and I put them in a small vase. The esoterica
of gardeners is something I aspire to. Although it is Friday,
I know no way of improving the world, except to be kind,
love my enemies, etc., which I mostly do. It’s easy to love hard
to like. I never visited my father in Bombay but I should have.
I bought a Lonely Planet India and outlined a monsoon-season
appropriate itinerary, but I was disinclined to rely too much on
my father’s charity. Now I wish for more of it. If I played chess,
I would only get to check mate by accident or error, even though
I was in the honors society in high school, which was thirty years
ago, when my impropriety was minimal. I like to talk about
being ungovernable but it’s not true. I’m a part of the gears,
same as you. A devout non-believer who doesn’t need to chill
the fuck out. I am responsive. Look, we’ve all tilted at windmills
and hoped beyond hope. Reading Don Quixote is one way
to develop a solid vocabulary in Spanish. Trevor did it once.
The buttercups are wilted despite the vase and water. Should
buttercups be picked? Lawns should not be mowed but instead
should grow full of flowering weeds. My bead collection is mostly
old prayer beads. Bones and stones, no falsehoods, no trying.
