Nice Feeling

Nice feeling, to stand in August heat while a cooling breeze blows over the skin. These occasions are rare in Seattle. Summer is never a fully realized idea. It’s more of a flirtation. I hear the door close. R disappears. There’s a young dog freaking out somewhere nearby. I go out to investigate. I hear loud voices in the park. I see R at the end of the driveway, hose in hand, watering plants. The average pressure from a home water faucet is about 40 to 60 PSI (pound-force per square inch). Power, which is the rate of energy transfer, is measured in Joules per second, also called Watts. Horsepower: unit of mechanical power. Why horses? Why not elephants, elephant power, or camels, camel power? They don’t have the same ring. R returns. Did you hear that dog? It’s there every night, the same yippy dog. “Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus,” writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic Monthly, “and despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered.” Wakefulness is a desirable state, I prefer it to drowsiness, though drowsiness is pretty nice, too. Can you be wakeful & drowsy simultaneously? I don’t see why not. Adrift on a bed while paying heed to the things that drift through the mind. Or the weight of the body on something soft, mattress with springs, but you don’t really feel the springs, the springs are there like a set of mathematical elements, emulsions in a lowland of undress & spirally connection. Giant explosion in Beirut today. Jaw-dropping. Over 100 people dead, 4,000 injured. The cause was 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored unsafely in a warehouse for six years. The blast was so powerful it was felt in Cyprus, 120 miles away. A man in a shirt splattered with blood points to his car, upside down on a highway guardrail. Hot August afternoon we go walking by an eggplant purple Scion sedan, the front panel just behind the front tire on the driver’s side riddled with bullet holes. He must’ve gone through a bad section of town, says R. There should be a curtain for words, so that when the curtain raises on a word, we see the full theater, etymology, connotations, meaning. The King & Queen as little puppets hitting one another with sticks. Sliding mirrors for the bedroom closet: another room with another version of me. Assuming that’s me. Thud thud thud. Sound of footsteps from upstairs, followed by clatter of dishes, followed by hiss of water. The river Doubs has gone dry in France, due to chronic drought & over-development. "The waterproofing of the soil is due to the increase in residential areas, roads, commercial areas. We notice that there is hardly any wetland, no more marshes, no more buffer zones which retain the water." When did human life begin to live so detached from nature? Nature isn’t external. Nature is everywhere. It’s another word for life. Where there’s life, there’s nature. And where nature is under assault, life is under assault.