Self-Portrait (#1-7)
#1
A Willie Nelson song and a car slipping into the approaching dusk like someone straightening their tie. Half-jokingly describing the surrounding mountains as being something like an Appalachian Jörmungandr. Just the way they sit there, you say, as you wait for either one of you in the conversation to begin to reverse engineer the logic — to show that that ol’ world snake was here all along, and here are the folk songs to prove it.
#2.
A lyrical elliptical bike, i.e., ‘The wheels are there somewhere.’ (And how.)
#3.
Quietly imagining a scenario where everyone who has ever thought of something in a dream came up with their respective idea in the same dream at the same time — Paul McCartney thinking up the idea for ‘Yesterday’ alongside James Cameron thinking up the idea for Terminator, side by side.
#4
I don’t want to show my hand too much, but it’s striking to pair this piece in Harper’s with this dispatch from Davos. (Which feels narratively different than the splashiness of something like Glass Onion or any of the breathless non-fiction books published over the past twenty years that have flagged how rich rich folks are, doesn’t it?)
#5
I love that my deck of missing persons cards has gone missing.
#6
Listening to the gruesome ending of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark on audiobook while at the gym is a surreal experience.
#7
Slight kicks of wind. Slight paprika sprinkles of gray suggesting that the day still has the capacity to swerve into some rain shower of some kind. The problem here in this fragment could — of course — be solved by looking at a weather forecast, but why drive sane when you can drive blind? Why have a meteorologist when you can have a line full of Appalachian cliches sitting on rocking porch chairs that have been dragged into the studio to give us the weather report based on the state of their collective knees? (Even a cursory google search suggests this is a myth, but who are we to let facts get in the way of a good ‘What If?’)