(no subject)
PART II
Today I ran. At half past eight I woke, the sound of organs filled my room, the radio across the room, as I strained my neck, my upper abdomen, to sit, said 91.1 FM, flashed 91.1 FM, and leaving it to blink at me I let my head rest again on the pillow, turning my body over to the right, facing my room. Light poured through the open curtains above me; sound, through the window, half open on the right side; on the orange chair next to me I saw my cat for a moment: he opened his mouth to meow at me, his yellow eyes blazing with false anger, with hatred, cat eyes, wide, with small paintbrush hair on the nosebridge; he opened his mouth to meow, but no sound came out; he dissappeared, I closed my eyes and there was a pile of clothes, three feet high, where he was, where he used to be, for a second: just a second ago.
As the organ music played and the dj came on and told me about the Bach Festival and today's events and I tuned him out and listened through the small crack beneath my door for the sounds of my family waking up and moving around and letting Skye out of his kennel and feeding him and pottying him and saying, "Good boy! Good boy!" when he did something good and saying, "You too Ellie! Good girl!" immediately afterwards, because dogs have feelings too and my mom knows this and so she makes sure not to hurt them because, if she does, they might run away, and live free in the wild, like wild dogs in Africa or street dogs in Mexico, and then get hit by cars, and then die, so that we will have to send them off to a pet cremation service and pay money and then find a suitable box to bury the dogs' things in, their leashes and dog bowls and favorite hard rubber bones, and as the organ music played and the dj came on and told me about the Bach Festival and today's events I tuned him out and began looking around for a book to read. I found Portrait of a Romantic by Steven Millhauser. O!
I read for exactly eight minutes; then it was nine, and time for me to get up and run, get up and go. I rolled over, stretched, threw the covers off, sat up, stood up, leaned over to the orange chair with the pile of clothes on it, grabbed a pair of shorts from the middle of the pile of clothes, put the shorts on as I hunched my back, leaned over to the orange chair with the pile of clothes on it, gabbed a pair of ankle socks from the bottom of the pile of clothes, put the socks on as I hunched my back and lifted up my feet, shuffled over to the door, slipped on my shoes, and left the room, closing the door behind me.
Our patio is covered. When I left the covered area I began to jog, first around the van and then down the gravel driveway. I try to lean forward when I jog downhill, especially this early in the morning; that way my legs don't get used to stretching down with each step, because when theat happens they tense up when I hit the level or slightly uphill portions of the road, each step a jarring, pained step. The road is shaded, and as I pace I am conscious of three things: my breathing, as the pattern is important, it is important to get into a steady pattern; my vision, as I learned last time I ran, that it is helpful to let your vision slack as you run by looking off at a single fixed point, so that you don't have to expend energy on moving your eyes from place to place; and I am conscious of my bare itching torso, which is bare, and itches so that I have to wrap one of my arms around my shoulders, or move one of my arms to my chest, each couple of steps, which disrupts my arm motion, which is also important.
For a moment, as I appoached the turning point, the stop sign stayed fixed in my slacking vision. It bounced up, down, up, down, up, down, up... until I could see the white of the letters, the red of the sign, count each of the eight sides, the flawed white of the letters, the bright red of the sign, each of the sides I could count, I could count, if only I weren't so tired...
Outside my house I paced back and forth in front of the garage, hands on head. When I opened the door my mom said nothing from her rocking chair; my dad, in the kitchen, looked at me but was silent. When I showered I tried to keep the water cool, but cool to me then might not be cool to me at a normaler time, and so I didn't know which standard to go by. Eventually I decided to turn the knob until the water felt good, but then I wasn't not so sure of what felt good, and so I just stood there, letting the water wash away any remnants of sweat in any crevaces (crevices?) in my body.
This was important because my body and its crevaces (crevices?) were a city to me, then, at that time; a sprawling metropolis, three dimensional, sometimes upside down and backwards as it wrapped around my arms. Just as when I was little and would sit in the back of the car, pretending that each drop of water crossing the windshield was a living thing, a little dancing person, so I now tried to make myself belive that each drop of water running down my body was a cop, rooting the evil grimy sweat out of Gotham, reforming its violent, crime filled ghettos with the pound of a beat-stick and the rush of a drop, each cop's a drop, each drop's a cop, rushing, rushing down...
After work I finished Portrait of a Romantic. 3 and 1/2 out of 5 stars, maybe 4 out of 5. It's very boring, but the prose style is pretty damn fancy.