It feels like one day just flows into the next, like tributaries, cricks into some grand headwater of time. Sometimes. Sometimes a day will stall or like a shallow pond evaporate into nothing but mud and scum in August. I saw tadpoles once dancing in the mud. Dying, really, I think, I was alone, squatting, my scabby knees in front of me and mud in my hair. It felt like a dream; not in that way of fantasy or surrealness, more in the way that asphalt seems to become a lake on a hot horizon. You know what you are seeing is real, you also know it isn’t there, not really.
I guess that last bit is how days always are; you know they are real but you know, too, they aren’t there, here, wherever. It’s possible that keeping a journal of ponds that aren’t there is the wrong way to go about journaling. I mean the asphalt is there. I could write entries like;
August 2nd, 1978
I am somewhere, Pennsylvania perhaps, but I am moving through Pennsylvania and when the sun sets, late, nine thirty or ten, Pennsylvania will be behind me. I am on a local highway heading towards the interstate; my shirt is plastered to my back where the straps of my pack crease, my collar is damp, my feet are swollen in my boots. In two years I will be newlywed and halfway to Oregon. In four years my son will be born. In a half hour I will meet a very large woman in an old land yacht wearing only panty hose and a clingy blouse, she’ll shout over the country western music, shout her judgment of the sinful ways of the girls in some little town whose name I will not catch. She will offer me a peach.
I don’t though, not very often. I write about either the minute details or the broad canvas, but not what is actually going on, or will be going on, or has gone on sometime in the near future. It’s all the same day, man.
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