I was walking up from the library to the theatre, thinking about writing as I had just been reading about writing. I was going over in my head of another day where I as walking along this route. Bushes and bikes scattered in some meaningful rythm. This time its night and some of the bikes I only see out of the corner of my eye and they scare me. Though Im not sure what my brain thinks they can be, its not like litter that moves in the wind so you think its an animal. Last time I walked up the way it was windy, bright. Someone was wailing on their horn-- the university has moved all the music students to an abandoned dormitory to practice. The windows face the walkway which is too perfect, like a gateway lined up with a giant mouth yelling just persistantly enough for someone, a non-music student, to yell SHUT UP to one of the offensive windows. And tonight I am walking up thinking about this horn going and I hear it again, another saxophone. And its just right, swinging into everything, my steps are bringing me to it and the bushes and the bikes are spaced out for each of these notes. Its going WAH WAH WAH WOOOOW and I look up, halfway thinking to yell shut up but if I did I woudnt have meant it. A window was open, it was someone I knew. I yelled his name and felt like Romeo romancing. I think of other times with other saxophonists and am not sure how I feel about the cycleness of all things. If I'd rather it just not keep going around. Or maybe these are the good times.

books

My grandmother, who is 93, reads a lot of novels. She cant do a lot of things physically any more, so my mother runs to the library every week or so to bring back stacks of fiction novels for her. I read them, then I forget them-- my grandmother will joke. In her room, I found a little boutiqu-y book journal that someone, maybe my uncle, got for her. Its not more than 4 by 4 inches big, each page you enter the book title and author, a rating, and "comments" (three lines). Do you like using this?-- I ask her. The first few pages have comments written out in a spidery hand "Good book. Dont understand why the husband would leave his..." before running out of room. This happened a few more times: "Good book. How come children dont appreciate...", "Good book. Didnt like the ending, so sad that the woman who...". Eventually, as the pages went on, the comments turned into "I like this" "I liked this" "Good book" "Really good book"-- all better fitting of the tiny space. -- I didn't know how write in it at first, answered my Mammaw, but I like the journal now that I've figured out the right way to do it.

other people

I saw a girl in the library who was in my English class last semester. She had gotten a hair cut. Nothing dramatic, just tidying up the ends... but I was at once happy and sad at the encounter. Happy that people exist and have lives, sad that I'm not in them. Not that I was ever in her life to begin with; but, when she was in my class, she was mine. I covet these proofs of every day-ness, the same way that when I write about trees I really just want to be the tree. I know that if I ever became the girl in my English class from last semester then I would no longer have the luxury of beholding her from afar as part of a reassuring fabric of life. What I had wanted would be gone and on the tips of someone else's hair.

human nature

Tonight, I pulled my car into the outpatient surgery center's parking lot. This outpatient center and lot is beside the apartment complex where I live and is going out of business. Before the attendants of my complex knew this, we did not park in the lot for fear that we, not belonging, would get towed. We'd take our cars and go all the way around the back of the apartment building, the least choicest spots. But now, with the news of retreat from our neighbors, cars have begun to creep like bold kudzu vines into this new space. First three, then six, now eighteen dot the more convenient lot-- the ecology of parking.

Christine preferred reading over writing. In the same way, she felt much more comfortable as a pallet of awe for more dynamic personalities-- eating them like books, then trying to discern what thier qualities did as a literary parts. Her life was a paper; the people in it, excerpts from prose fiction novels. If it ever made her jealous that some people so effortlessly, so hugely lived, she did not show it often.

Schopenhauer had something to say about music. I'm not sure what that was. All I know is that when I listen to music the only feeling I get is that something is missing. This may be the whole notion of "the soundtrack"... where music is paired with moving image. I've been exposed to this so throughoughly that now if I simply hear music, especially classical music, it just sounds like it is narrating something that I cannot see. This sort of response would not be valuable on a test about Schopenhauer.