Il est trop tard (This post is mobile friendly)

The beautiful Georges Moustaki wrote:

Mon enfant ceci loin
Il est deja demain
passe passe le temps
Il n'y en a plus pour tres longs temps

Pourtant je vis toujours
Pourtant je fais l'amour
M'arrive meme de chanter
Sur ma guitar

Tu etais si jolie
Je suis seul dans mon lit
Passe passe le temps
Il n'y en a plus pour tres longs temps

I couldn't have said it better myself. Nor could I have conjugated those verbs without assistance. Well played, Georges. Here's the link.

Update from @work

-Eating cheaply with rice and beans - very good move. Lots of chickpeas and cabbage, and my favorite, parboiled rice, which has an 'improved nutritional profile,' and is resistant to weevils [boll or otherwise].

-I woke up at 6 this morning and went running on autopilot. Couldn't have even been awake for the first half mile or more. It was good enough, and could become something like a twice-a-week activity. Overtraining could be a risk, though.

-Wrote a list of plausible rejected Jon Huntsman campaign slogans [in an attempt to be funny]. Maybe I'll post them later, if they stand up to increased scrutiny. Or if they make A laugh.

-Plain yogurt, maple syrup swirl. Perhaps not as good as yogurt and honey, but still bears further investigation.

-District of Columbia: 200 range of ZIP codes. Federal Government: 202-205 range. Virginia: 201, and 220-246 ranges. Massachusetts, of course, 010-027 range. Shall I go on? I have a ZIP code map of the United States in my office. ZIP codes are very interesting. It stands for Zone Improvement Plan, if you were wondering.

-Idaho: 832-839 range. Tennessee: 370-385 range....

Thou canst tell why one's nose stands i' the middle on's face?

So I went down to my local Barnes and Noble BOOKSELLERS to do a little browsing. I meandered over to the fiction section and made my selection, Jonathan Franzen's latest. I was about to just walk out the door without paying when I felt a strong hand on my shoulder.

It was the hand of Toby Keith.

Toby Keith, clear as day. Toby Keith, wearing a Barnes and Noble-branded cowboy hat, was standing right behind me. He pointed to the near end of the store.

His voice rang out clear and true: Cash register's that way, old hoss. Best pay up. And always remember,

Freedom isn't free

I was waiting down at the ancient gate

It's when they've announced they're leaving that you see them most. People are motivated by finality, Jack decided without ten seconds' further consideration. The threat of real action, irrevocable consequences, will jolt them, move them, if nothing else will.

On this particular night he was thinking of, they had been sharing ice cream, which he had done at other times with Brandon and assorted third parties.

At this time the phone rang insistently, but he chose to ignore it.

What was the flavor? It was something like cereal milk, flavored with banana, or something else he couldn't remember. They passed the cardboard cup and shared a spoon, being family or close to it. Or maybe there were three spoons, he could not remember. It was a happy evening, with laughter, and the memory was still vivid.

The girls in the downstairs apartment were an infrequent presence in his life. He didn't know much about them except they had cats and parties and liked to gossip at late hours on the front step. Their voices would ring out clearly in judgement on cold nights when he had already been asleep two hours or more. Those nights were shining and crisp.

Filler

-It's been a while since the last slightly lazy bullet-point post.

-Letters could be a really productive way of advancing my writing. If nothing else, they provide plenty of practice. Also, nearly every good writer wrote good letters. Also, they still feel special to write and send, and pretty sure it makes people feel special to receive them.

-Question: do I write best on trains, or is it more that I write only on trains?

-Trains are collectively a monolith. They have ever been and always will be.

-Listen to Orwell on writing; he was very good at it.

-These very words may someday be worth their weight in gold, except that internet words can't have any literal weight, so it will have to be figurative.

-My instinct told me don't lay it on too thick. You want to say nice things, but that can be taken too far. I've made my point, that I'm a clever fellow, that I can reference Shakespeare and Bogart almost simultaneously. Don't push your luck.

-The person whose job it is to choose the style of bench at Central Square-Lynn.

-Invasion of personal communications by business communication modes.

-Todd Barry: genius. G-E-N-I-U-S.

hurry, hurry, hurry, before i go insane

toe-stepping

uncomprehending streetlights
looked askance at a dim,
hazy talk about nothing really [don't you just tend to agree with people]

we three blanketing someone else's car
philosophical after half-a-bottle [only]

she burned me with a cigarette,
And I didn't even notice she was there.

cars as brogues

I surveyed the lot. 5:30 on a Wednesday, there was no doubt that R— would still be lurking in the office. Her car must be amongst the last picked-over remnants in the stew pot parking lot. Which one?

Consider the source. Micromanager, another one of those people who seems to have a work face they put on every morning, giving you the eerie feeling of talking to the face, not the person. There must be a car for her here, one that fits.

I saw it clear, like icy water in a steel sink: the Honda Accord nestled in a corner spot.

Moderate luxury without ostentation.
Modernity without hipness.
Practicality without ugliness.
Comfortably, tenaciously situated right in the middle.

That it was beige went without saying.

event horizon

I could only hope to not be this good at worrying for the rest of my life.

"We have changed plans."

This strikes the ear funny, if you let it. Maybe we haven't changed our own plans, but inadvertently changed the plans of others by our unwitting actions. The words don't discriminate. Plans have been changed, though, by us. We have changed plans. Keep repeating it, it sounds absurd if you keep at it. We have changed plans. It could also be that we are now in possession of changed plans, as in We have changed plans. We've come to be in charge of them, who knows how. You hadn't considered these notions, had you?

"...so flowers, except in the common-noun sense (he knew birds liked them, as did bees), sent no message to Keith's blue eyes." -- Martin Amis

How clever

cryptic, now is it?

Try as I might, I would be unable for some time to commit to a serious regime of verbal economies.
I had been warned that as a rule, one should beware of people who treated others according to a sliding scale of preference and status. A person wholly kind and honorable will treat everyone with kindness and honor, so this line of thinking went. Aren't we always, though, making exceptions to rules, for ourselves and for those we want to love? So I now saw her through this lens. That, and she was something of a fabulist. She only did it sometimes, I covered. Andrea is different, though. This assertion I have based entire worlds on, worlds. She really is genuinely nice. This could not be denied, either, for based on it were other worlds, presumptions, years of life tenderly lived in advance. These were not to be undone under any circumstances. She's not an airhead, she's substantial, unlikely to float away on an unfortunately timed thermal. This is no joke, either, I am not what's called an unreliable narrator. Self-deceit is for the birds.
I would say I was proud of being a good soldier for her, but that wasn't really the case; I didn't need to be the good soldier because I wasn't even thinking about it very much. She crossed the street, and looking back, smiled and waved again. Her smile is close to me, always.

That you weren't wrong

So if life is so hard, what makes it worth the while? It's the people, it must be. These people everywhere, I love them, they're imperfect and so worthy all the same, or because of it.

And how I missed her but then she would say these magic things that floated in and out and in my head. They were little things but that nothing was precious, it's trivial, but together these things accrete into everything that you have together, really a huge collection of tiny things. That's how I came to think of it, anyways.

I found it so funny that I could hang with them even on subjects that I didn't care about, or TV shows I hadn't watched in years. Could I help but interpret this as evidence of some kind of social intelligence now in my possession? It didn't used to be like this, high school was a long time that I don't remember three quarters of.

I was reading a Bret Easton Ellis novel, which I didn't understand at all. It was about people whose lives have become completely empty, and the flashes of human emotion that seep through into their days at the cracks. The emotions, when they're present, don't seem natural at all because the default state is a void. His next book was better by far, even considering the dark themes and the parts about people living empty lives, it felt warm and supple by comparison with the icy, nihilistic rigor of the first novel. Poor Bret, I'd have to say. It must be awful to even be able to write emptiness so realistically. I'd much rather not be able to write well about empty people. It might rub off if you're not careful.

You set my soul alight

-Moving in is like a burglary in reverse.

Clever, utterly devoid of meaning, or both? You be the judge.

Phantom Pt. II

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone, and this house just ain't no home, anytime she goes away.

Lift up your hearts

I've decided at last that I like seltzer. If this comes as a shock to you, please don't be offended. I've only just arrived at the conclusion myself; there's no way you could have known. Think of it this way: every time God closes a window, he opens a bottle of seltzer.

Peace be with you.

And also with you.

etc.

I will not be cowed. I am not afraid. Etc.

Something in the way of explanation, belated

A plowed field with little puddles in the furrows that overtop their banks, reminders of the deluge a week past. Like a memory of it but not the real thing. Sad in their way of reminding us of what's gone and can't come back.

An older man walking down a concrete path to his car in the company lot. Weathered blue jacket and work pants, he drives home to an empty house, falls asleep alone to wake tomorrow and go to work again.

The way the light falls on the train approaching sunset, slightly dulled yellow-orange, passes over it and makes shadows on the other side.

Empty streets in the dusk where no one goes. Open doors left open unattended and broken windows uncared for.

The open expanse of the harbor at Lynn, blue-black and soulless, looks like it goes on forever.

These things I saw from my window. They were sad, but didn't sadden me.

Way, haul away, we'll haul away, Joe!

What I've come to realize, or at least I hope I have, is that I have nothing to lose in this situation, so I'm pushing all my chips into the middle. To use an uncomfortably hackneyed poker metaphor.

If you don't know to what I am referring, don't worry, because I'm the only one who does. I'm just putting this down as a little reminder to myself, and for purposes of posterity. We'll see how it turns out.

And because I don't like to go too long without a blog post.

And because I want to get better at writing.

With great periphrasis comes precious little

Dig if you will the little warning on the end of alcohol ads (because alcoholic beverage producers care about your safety a great, great deal)

It starts here:

-Don't drink and drive

It becomes this:

-Please drink responsibly

It starts to meander:

-Responsibility matters

It devolves into this here:

-With great beer comes great responsibility

I see it going here:

-A responsible person does responsible things

And in 2046, when all meaning has been painfully wrung out of the warnings and we live in a euphemistic hell of saying what we don't mean, it will end with this:

-Just be

silly poems are my middle name

The floating yellow apparitions

in the black

Are windows.

Not windows on the darkness in

my soul,

but windows on North Shore houses.

musing

Hear cars swooping by on Harvard Ave. Feel tennis soreness in the right tricep from hitting wicked forehand winners yesterday. Perceive cool breeze of a Boston September night. Decompress and rest feet from standing all day.


Let it go.

It's 16 miles to the promised land

I was completely fascinated by this quotation from an article by David Hare in the New York Review of Books:

"It's incredible but the country itself still feels provisional. Of what other state can this be said? I notice when I am in Britain that you plan for 2038, you say that there will be this railway or that airport. But no Israeli plans so far ahead without feeling a pang in his heart which asks whether we shall be here at all. We look so strong from the outside, we have such a large army, so many nuclear weapons, we're so certain in our expansion, and yet from the inside it doesn't feel like that. We feel our being is not guaranteed. You might say we have imported from the Diaspora the Jewish disease-a sense of rootlessness, an ability to adapt and make do, but not to settle. After sixty years, Israel is not yet a home."

Hare is quoting an unnamed Israeli writer. What he said floored me. Sixty years gone by, that's a lifetime for many people, and his insight into the country is that it is deeply ingrained in the souls of Israelis to wonder whether each day might be the last for their nation. Sixty years of being, followed immediately by suddenly not being. Can you imagine the great, great fear that state of mind would bring? Can you imagine living in constant terror of the end of your existence?

The writer is correct, we could never think of the state of things that way in a country like the US, Britain, or almost any other on earth. The mentality he describes is so inconceivable from where I sit that I am having a very hard time putting myself in his shoes. I'm not sure if I believe him either, but if it was true, what consequences it would have for our planet! Would we finally understand the Israeli mentality? Would we know the secret to peace? Would we have fairness and justice and equality on both sides? But we cannot the greatest question of all, and the one that may never be answered, Will Israel ever feel safe enough?