Ah, well. Reality is confusing, and my reactions to it even more so. I suppose it doesn't matter that I didn't get another pile of leaves raked this evening. I've got five good-sized piles that will probably be too much to fit into the wheelie bins this week anyway, and if there is rain later in the week any additional piles would just get soggy and then fail to dry out before the next yard waste pickup day. Leaves still astrew dry out much quicker. No doubt we'll have some more sunny days, maybe even a few more very warm days, before the really cold weather sets in and puts the nights ashiver with chilly winds.
Oh, Safeway was out of the cat food that was on sale that I intended to stock up on so I'll have to go back, and by Tuesday, which is the last day of the sale. How annoying. I hope they have it in stock by then or I'll have wasted a trip. I punished them by removing a bunch of stuff from my list and buying it as the other store instead. Eventually the other store will piss me off some way and I'll take stuff off my list there and buy it at Safeway. Yes, I know this is futile, but it makes me feel better for a day or two. Eventually I will die and the store I was pissed off at last will take the hit. I won't be around to care, but I hope I remember it in my last moments and say That'll teach you! It will be sufficiently enigmatic to serve as some pretty good last words.
Sunday Verse
The End
by Arkaye Kierulf
You must have felt it working in your bones. It's begun: The papers print the same stories over and over, and have you checked the obituaries? Already, nobody remembers how their first kiss went. The phone keeps ringing and ringing when nobody's home. Between our skins is a necessary friction that separates us forever. Look: space. Somewhere, a lost key. It's begun: What was once the wind or an echo or an accidental sweetness is now a bird outside your window singing with perfect pitch and timbre the song that's on all our tongues, cut. What pulls from the earth to exist the earth pulls back into itself: this and this and this is mine. You own nothing. Our bodies breathe to a rhythm, to one direction, to one regression. It's begun: The truth stares us down like an owl: There's no place to go: You own nothing. In the dark you hear movement — a squeak, a hiding. The heart opens, closes, opens.
