Apr. 23rd, 2023

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It is flat here. All I see here every day is this fragment of the mini-metropolis. From the back yard looking north I see the tops of a few trees and two rows of utility poles and their wires flanking the bike path. At night I can see a tall streetlamp where the bike path crosses a road. To the south and east I can see the apartment house and its parking lot and the hedge that conceals its swimming pool. Sometimes I hear people splashing in it, but not very often. I see the cars in the parking lot, and see them come and go.

When I go down the driveway to the mail box I can see this short street and its small duplexes, the road curving out of sight to where it stops at the busier through road. Above the rooftops of the duplexes across the street I see the upper floor added to the old department store a few years ago for offices, with a low, hip-roofed central tower vaguely reminiscent of a prison watch tower. In a narrow gap between the swimming pool hedge and its neighboring house I can see a sliver of the through road where a car will occasionally pass. Across the apartment house parking lot I see a stretch of freeway on an elevated berm, cars and trucks passing by faster. In the sky I see clouds, and at night sometimes the moon and a couple of planets, but most stars are washed out by the town lights.

This is all there is, day after day. On the Internet I see digital simulacra of reality, images of other places that might as well have vanished from the earth ages ago, or be someone's dreams not yet realized. For me, daily reality is these rooms, this screen, the sounds from outside and from the speakers, and memory that fades almost hourly. I can smell auto and diesel exhaust, other people's dinners cooking, sometimes perfumes from the laundry room, once in a great while a skunk, rarely a nostalgic whiff of cigarette smoke, as though the last five decades hadn't happened.

What does all this mean? Probably nothing. The endless old tale of the idiot, which in time— probably soon— I will no longer hear. But the last couple of days have been so balmy, and I've needed only one light blanket when I've slept, distracting me somewhat from even the now-perennial aches, that I've almost been able to imagine myself as pleased as the birds I hear chirping in the nearby trees might be. It's not a great life, but its probably good enough. It could be worse. It probably will be, before very long. For now, I'll have a nightcap, like some traveler no one will ever meet again.


Sunday Verse )

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