nexus of consiousness

"The nexus of the conscious and the unconcious is of short duration. The unconsious mind can slough off the useless, or, indeed, the unlovely. When its reiteration is coupled with compulsion, we may be due for grief."

---

Love Minus Zero (reprise)

Humid tonight. I'm sitting in the kitchen listening to the country doctor, rambling again about the softball team that could have been. He talks like a televangleist that lost his crowd.

I sit and wait. The humidity turns wet, and the wind picks up, howling like a hammer. If it gets too wild, the bridge might not make it. It trembles all the time.

He says bank down the road got tellers that could hit a curve like a wall. I ask him about the tellers daughters. He says the bankers' nieces look like china dipped in water, and they're waiting for perfection. Perfection ain't real, I tell him. I got a tree in my car, and a bath in the yard. He says the girls are just letting the wise guys buy em gifts anyway.

The night's turned cold and rainy. Country doc can ramble all he wants, I'll just stare at that screendoor and wait. My love is coming, and she's not unlike a raven -- at my window with a broken wing.

Sunset Levels

The high ambition for the night was to watch the sunset. One said, come on, I know a hill.

The reply was: I don't wish to miss my fave TV show.

Whatever happenned to wreckless abandon? the first one came back. I'm not asking much. We can both just sit there and stare.

It is my fave, was the reply, and this, they both knew, was the only response coming.

And then they both thought, sunsets: there will be more.

But they thought it on completely different levels.

from "Galapagos"

by Kurt Vonnegut

Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well -- my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air, and I now pluck this thought of Darwin's from the balmy atmosphere:

Progress has been much more general than retrogression.

'Tis true, 'tis true.