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07 August 2006

That time in early August when, finding it nearly dark at eight on a cloudy evening, you sense the summer and the sunshine slipping away, experience an anticipatory taste of autumn melancholy and winter bleakness, and the next day, riding the bus all morning under a pristine blue sky, are filled with unease, a mix of loneliness and finity.

I'm tired of people talking about leaving New York City. The more people talk about this, the less likely it seems they are to do it. This holds for a lot of things I think. When I'm ready to go, I'm not going to talk about it; I'm just going to go. And so on.

Home for fragments and words that would otherwise have been buried in my journal file or forgotten in a half-completed notebook.

On a slightly turbulent plane ride one week ago, window seat looking out across one wing. Remembering reading an experiment -- the setup escapes me -- in which a person is sensitized to an inanimate object, in this case a desktop; striking the desktop makes the person react as if you'd struck the top of their hands. So I tried to project myself into the wings of the plane, and the wings into me, by concentrating upon the buffeting, the roll of the craft; and after I while I could half feel it, a ghost feeling, an anticipation of a feeling, so when the wings caught cross-currents, I could feel a simultaneous strain in my pectorals, the lateral muscles across the top of my chest, tingling, thrilling with force and freedom of wind.