Schoo, schug, schoough, schoogh, schugh, the bike tire of my old Bianchi as it rolls on the trainer stand..., the color of its frame of the trademark Celeste, almost of a Virgin of Guadalupe green blue, a hint of starlight, sounds as I pedal slowly through the night, relaxing, unwinding, throwing the muscles of my legs into a sort of match with themselves, calisthenics, like a baseball game, a rhythm, a changing of tensions, as if a sailboat now were catching the wind.  The bar rolls under the tire...  The legs, the quads, the calves, make their own invisible sound.

Underneath, within the bicycle itself, a smoothness that has withstood perfectly over time, over years, the smoothness of the mechanical chemistry of the Campagnolo factory, hubs, bearings, the crankset, set into lubrication for a thousand years if not eternity, the sound of an efficiency that overrides the sound of the back wheels tires passing over the roller bar that substitutes the road itself of this trainer stand the bike is confined by above the carpet, primarily by a clamp that screws down onto the back axle, sandwiching the carefully crafted  quick release hub.  The pressure holds the bike without squeezing out the vital lubrication.  The bicycle itself is a perfection of smoothness.  You're riding the same bike, in the same way, as Fausto Coppi, or Marco Pantani, going up L'Alpe D'Huez.  The same holiness applies, a moonshot on a bicycle, the solitary climber fighting off the brutish teams.

The banded muscle of the legs vibrate back and forth, pulling, pushing... kneading the bones around in their circle.  They tighten, they loosen, they jump and dance, and they speak to the organism as a whole, animated with life.

The fan is on before me.  Whir, whir, and another, the air conditioner behind the sofa, set to fan. It is summertime, August.  What the hell are you doing up at this hour anyway.  Watching Father Barron on the television screen, Life On Fire, story of Catholicism.




And now in the woods, or even as I type.  A strange feeling, one I am not used to.  The feeling of actual happiness, as I go to work.  The path, through the woods, level, then descending, then climbing.  As I enter the woods, a homeless man I respect but do not trouble, off to the left, living there, as far as I can tell, year round.  He once told me that it was against the rules to ride my bike on the paths in the park, and I politely obeyed, and then later--after my own encounters with mounted park police--he told me it okay to ride, and I thanked him and explained that I liked to walk and look at the birds.  A sort of friendship.


Platonov, Amongst Plants and Animals:

It was much like that opening scene.  The baby rabbit playing with its own droppings.  The simple anonymous man, 'hunting,' without the slightest intent to hunt, just 'getting nature.'



What has gotten into me, he wondered, on the path to work, through the woods.  He looked upon the decay of a certain fallen tree trunk, and the hill, seeing the beauty of its decay in the late afternoon forest-filtered sunlight, dappled, bringing out the trees fibers turning into brown dirt.   Down the steep hill, a massive tree, uprooted in a storm, on its side downward over the path of the creek that leads down to the stream.  The tenders of the park had cut through the thick trunk where it had come down on the lower path.  The dirt pulled up, the roots bare.  The tree down, the man saw, reclaiming some effort, that of being in nature, and it all making sense again.  "What is this strange almost unfamiliar feeling of old happiness, joy, contentment... Possibility."

There was the stream below, and each object in the woods along the path was a worthy subject of Atget, a photograph, all of it, infinitely so, composed naturally, how could one even know what the best part of it all was?  Was it the larger fallen tree, uprooted in a summer downpour of high winds, down below, or, near where you walked along with a deer grazing just 15 feet away near saplings planted in the restoration of local flora...  Overgrown, yes, but still, life, green, air, water, mineral, and some sort of fire, unseen.

Is it that it is August, the body full of the sunlight of summer, before the cruel clock change of early November, and then the winter, the holidays at work, the difficulties.

Who am I?  What is time?  I have found some happiness again, isn't that interesting...  In such a mood now, now, what he was going to did not seem oppressive, but almost rather presented itself as an opportunity, not so difficult to put into some form of being...  The man observed all this within and without, came to the low bridge over the stream as it came down from the manicured meadows where the stream was lined with stones making a slow series of tiny waterfall pools, and proceeded pushing his mountain bicycle up the paved road that climbed steeply.

And with the good feeling, a kind of awful raw sensitivity, a sense of a shimmering white-clad strength of spirit within.  Which he must have found strange, a thing going back to childhood with stuffed animals, infinitely gentle.  Idiotic, but acceptable.



... And Doctor, this is, well, you know, you're that age, you fall for a beautiful girl--in quotes--and you just think it's going to work out;  of course, it has to;  it's love, unselfish, Corinthian...  But it doesn't work out.  It's a series of unstoppable decaying events that are of misunderstanding.  And because of what that relationship, that she and he, that time perfect for such developments and new opening chapters, well, that becomes a bright spot, romantic, against a backdrop of the stuff of life.  The stuff of life, well, you think you'd just be happy, that home would always be home, safe, secure, eternal.  You think you've gotten thus far and doing well as far as that ideal career of being the great teacher of words, poetry, literature, the psyche, the subconscious methods of the artist...  The seeds planted, well, yes, of course they are doing well.

But the story starts to change.  People become mortal.  Time, finite.   Poetry and the passing of time, all the more meaningful and poignant.   And it become seen that life is not easy.

You get a little bit quiet.  College, and living amongst all the facile New Yorkers who like to talk and hear themselves talk is a lot different from those towns where you went to school.  Small town, small town, lots of land, farms, barns, roads, and here and there the settlements that happen upon the earth.

You make mistakes, as any 20 year old kid would, the usual foolishness, shyness, making things more complicated than they would have been for the self-confident...

The bright spot of life becomes a serious downer.  Isn't that strange.  The thing that was, as you saw it, as a net to catch you, a parachute, something to care for you just isn't there.  And you drop like a rock and hit the ground.  Such is fame, ha ha.

It's like the very thing that, that you think anyway, will make you happy the answer to your dreams becomes the thing the chemistry of the depression, itself a sign, a token, of maturity and adulthood and grave seriousness, coalesces around.   A precipitation in the brew of life.  The red herrings of life, so to speak, even as we ourselves are herrings...

And you know, not that I am anybody, but this is what came upon Lincoln.  The thought of the rain on the girl's grave...   Or was it an awful foreboding sense of all the duties that lay before him out there in the future beyond such places as backwater towns, New Salem.   It was almost as if he liked that sort of poetic melancholia.  And he even wrote anonymous verse in the local paper;  we might find embarrassing, but 19th Century enough to get away with, the couplet lines.  The guy was handcuffed, constrained from taking anything seriously that wasn't his stuff, like the greatness, like the unintentional eloquence, simplicity, his golden rectangle thoughts, his originality...  But what a burden, a kind of madness gently strained...

That's how I feel about writing.  I'll come up with something eloquent, perhaps.  And it won't be about the girl, the Princess in the book, anymore.   It will come as being about the noble voyage of the soul in a fallen world, I suppose.  It will be an attempt to recapture, if you will, the eloquence of Corinthians and the things of that nature, parables, little lessons that tell no story other than that of the soul.  Yes, reclaim all that.  Even if you're just a fake, a phony, who-the-heck-are-you-kid, even if you're just trying to sound noble and being a bad actor about it, without the gravitas necessary.  Like Lincoln, in his Brooks Brothers overcoat--he earned it.   And he too, well, at least in the storybook, is about that noble voyage of the soul.   Yes, I think he must have felt some kind of very deep sense of angst or pain, anxiety, whatever, some foreboding sense of natural disasters and manmade ones, so that he wrote, as if it were his sword, his pen, a protective powerful weapon.

Not everyone careth about the poor.  Most of us don't seem them as equals.  Not everyone cares about the problems of the poor.  Rather, we strive ourselves not to be poor, not to end up that way, horrible, we think, the trailer park, the urban hovel month to month, scary, the neighbors.

Poor bastard.  That's what JFK liked to say, 'poor bastard.'  He must have thought of Lincoln in the twilight of those very words, poor bastard, the war, the idiot generals.  And Kennedy himself, he too was a poor bastard, with all his health issues, his spine rotting away from all the cortisone treatments, all the things that are supposed to make you healthy and functioning but eat at you, the supposed cures.

Do I want to write when I get up?  No, not always, sometimes I'm too scared almost.  Too worried.    And it would be all the easier to wake up and just stare at your iPhone, Facebook, email, Google News, the weather, Tinder, Bumble...  Rather than face all your own crap.

Well, that's not going to help you get to the place of writing.

In John's Book of Revelation images, in which the just are redeemed and the wicked put in their places, Jesus comes and asks us, explicitly, to write...  How 'bout that.  Emily Dickinson loved that.  Didn't she...

What do you do, Lincoln, to run it all off?  Where's the release valve for the pressure?  It has to come from somewhere.  Why not the old Bible, the Good Book...  Psalms.  The Gospels...  Does that make me deficient?

All a bit tiring.  "Stand up and fight!"  No, later.  I got to go to work anyway, later, and hang in this state between writing and not writing, sleep's dreams and waking thoughts.  The administrative efforts of life.



The day of the eclipse, I woke to a sort of WWI dream.  I'm handed a pistol, now that I've tried to step up, and I am charged with holding something like an Ernest Hemingway public square.  Someone much like my brother has enlisted me, told me that I have to, have to do the right thing, that I am being cowardly, and that all bad things are coming, and we must all now be in the greatest of defensive mode.  The airplanes, primitive and slow, like those of the first Great War, are circling now around from the left over the city skyline.  Aggressors have started to move in, and I discover, my pistol is really useless as far as accuracy and range.  To shoot at them is a joke, but there is much chaos.  The enemy is very aggressive.  Its individuals move about very quickly, appearing at random, and to shoot at them is like aiming a pea shooter at them.

The troops the honorable, like my brother, are in, are fighting off somewhere in the main defense of the old city, very serious, off to the right in my mind, and things are not going well.  The troops come up from the subway, like this is London during the blitz, and I shoot at the first "german" I see,which amounts to shooting uselessly at an enemy already captive, already basically dead anyway.  War is blindness.  I roll back and forth in my sleep.