The Musing of a Tired College Student

Vertigo restrained her from standing near expansive plate-glass windows on the upper floors of top-heavy skyscrapers. She teetered on high heels, the foundation undulating beneath her feet, or maybe she was moon struck again.

Once in a blue moon, the tides pull at us. The invoke humans to recall primitive ancestors who shouted at the sky, noise-makers who yowled in the dark, beckoning forces and spirits to aid their survival

Once upon a time the impassioned word was scratched into dirt, smeared and slapped onto rough walls, carved into trees, chiseled into stone, impressed onto paper, then printed into books.

The thing about swimming is it leaves you a lot of time to think. In fact there is little to do but think, unlike when hiking through the woods, for instance, when there are rocks to look out for, and the path of least effort to be found. In the sea all paths are the same, and at night in the fog there's not much to look at

Now I know this is the part of the story where the author winds it all up in a fine flourish that tells what it all meant, but luckly there are only a couple of pages left in this here book, so there isn't room. I'm glad of it.

Archipelago. The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.

At the present time, everything in the 19th Hole's respective colors seemed suddenly to brighten uncontrollably and become over-saturant, the visual environment appeared to faintly pulse or throb, and individual objects appeared, paradoxically, both to recede and become far-away...

The two never turned around or turned their heads sufficiently for him to get a real look at them; all there was to look at as the narrative unfold were the rear portions of their heads and necks, which he said appeared average and unremarkable and difficult to extrapolate anything from, which is the way the backs of strangers' heads on airliners nearly always look.

Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is.

Your ride around the base in open cattle trucks, everyone hunched together like the animals that are supposed to ride there.

Why not sink into it? Let death bring you down. Give death its sway

I know there are people who think the piece was too slow and repetitious, I guess, and uneventful. But it's probably too eventful. I put too much into it. It ought to be sparer, even slower than it is. It ought to be three fucking hours.

Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder.

How interesting it would be to raise the atmosphere, choose the palette, plump the sounds of her young life, and convert it all into language as seductive, as glittery, as an evening purse tucked away in the trunk!