i don't need to walk around in circles

twenty-four bicycles passed me on the walk to work this morning. again today it is in the nineties, humid as hell, and soupy air that thank god holds a little bit of wind while i'm walking.

last night i feverishly translated around twenty pages of written work. jason came in, drenched in sweat from the bike ride (no envy there) and said, are you working on a paper? i think he was confused. i must have looked a little driven. i said no, it was some translation work. he went and sat in the living room. at that point i realized it was already midnight, and i climbed into my sweat-sodden bed. i slept. no remembered dreams.

yesterday when talking to my mother on the phone she mentioned katie having had a good time at the beach. yeah, i said, she told me about it. i was walking along in the hot afternoon and feeling like a keen knife edge the divide between what i knew about that weekend and what she knew. the bomb waiting to drop on the other side of it. i said nothing. but this is one of the first times i've had that kind of information to withhold from her. and i wouldn't spill it, i didn't want to. it was just a new territory.

now i need to type the new translation pages, and will post some here later.

leah's letter came, and that made my night.

the void speaks back

it is quite a nothing day. i am resisting the stereo, i don't want to listen to anything. i don't want to do anything. i want to sink down and sleep.

i typed up all twenty-one pages of the translation. my wrists ache. here is another favorite part:

If someone had told me that a few scant years before, I had not existed, not even as an idea, it would not have meant anything to me. Not even the phrase that my aunt gave out as a response to the odd indiscrete question: "she was not yet born when her father died." This would not have put into question my eternity; there was no passage of time; past and future did not exist; they had to do with adult conversations that were for aduls precisely because they did not interest me. Later, when I understood that, okay, there was a time when I hadn't been here, it still meant nothing to me. I noted instead the ability of my uncle to veil the truth with a few lies. I was living and did not know that I lived, I was living with the unremembering simplicity of a thing eternal. The starry sky held no wonder for me, nor the fade of twilight, nor the flowering trees, nor the sight of myself alongside others much bigger than I. As if for eternity I had existed in my newness. I feared only thunderstorms.

this doesn't quite translate accurately. thunderstorms are temporali, which is associated with tempo, meaning time. avevo paura solo dei temporali. there's a tenuous connection here, thunderstorms as unknown agents of time. this fascinates me, but i cannot think how to convey it in english. intemperate weather just isn't the same.

must muscle up a reserve of pep for poor brian, who watches me moping around today. i don't want him to know the truth of this job, its utter and complete void-like waste of time. got to keep those paychecks rolling in. i got to got to

got to keep it all going.

interminability and indetermination

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