The best way to treat the horse after the long shift is to get home and get on the bike.  A slow rolling, a practiced evenness of pressure from both legs, left and right, clipped in to Look pedals, Shimano cycling shoes.  The horse needs to run after the complications, needs to run free, at a pace it feels necessary, fast, slow, full.  The legs swell again, doing what they're meant to do.

Kundera on his father, the composer, musician, professor from Brno:  visiting a man who is dying, riding a horse toward his death, the long unconscious breathing process.  His old man, Kundera's, losing that ability to talk, but pointing to the Beethoven piano sonatas, the very late full ones, close to the variations on the theme Von Beethoven did.  The old man putting his finger on 121, mutely, but expressing, here is the music that will last, that says it all.  Kundera in fiction writes it, turns to the necessary criticism we all must eventually apply to everyone, describing Beethoven's deaf journey touchingly into the very center of music, and the theme of these sonatas, the old man pointing to them no longer able to speak, even as tanks roll in in '68, as people are hung, 'drilling toward the very center of the earth," where in which the writer becomes, properly, the physicist poet philosopher drunk friend politician safe person intellectual teacher Central European tribesman healthy and full of strength.

Drilling into, toward,  the very center of the reality of Earth.  Beethoven.


I remember my brother messing with me on 12b, prompting me to do a thing against my own interest, bite into the bottom of the sugar cone, and the ice cream started to run from the bottom of it.