chase scenes serial #1
I am writing these first new words in a notebook from a gas station in Bismarck, our first stop after the airport. The tooth is different than the paper I am writing my big project on; it is cheaper, slick, flat. I am writing in pen also, which feels sloppy to me. Sloppy because it is permanent, perhaps it is irresponsible. Yet I would like for this to be something different, perhaps a fresh project in itself. I wrote a document of our trip to Rapid City and environs last spring. It was very straightforward. I just got out of the swimming pool here at the motel in Madora, the Americinn‡. What a poor name. Joyce would be a languid floating flower in his grave, or perhaps Lewis Carroll, whoever popularized the so called portmanteau word, the sway it has over popular American culture is repulsive, that and misspelling. Why a convenience store would be more appealing as Kum-n-Go rather than Come and Go is a mystery to me, as great as the portmanteau fast food shacks like Mrs. Winners / Del Taco or Long John Silvers / A&W or how about why does Long John Silvers even exist anymore. In the pool I floated on my back. There will be one less sheet in this book as I just tore out a sheet to remind myself to take the camera battery out of the charger before I leave for the hike tomorrow. Sixty nine (69) sheets. Dare I write that much? Could I do it before Sunday night? It is Friday night right now. I fear that I will be asleep soon. The warm water in the hot tub,
‡ Composition at home directly onto the machine feels odd. I had made a note to myself upon the third or fourth reading of the typed version of the text to develop a note for this page that details the irritating man who began watching television loudly in the lobby of Americinn. I should do this here although I do not feel a strong urge to chronicle that episode. It was very frustrating. In the vast landscape, in a little empty town, through the wall of our room, the ‘Dacotah Suite,’ the noise of a man loudly watching television in the middle of the afternoon in the public lobby of the motel, barged. I propose that sonic infringement upon my aural space, my personal right to silence, is tantamount to physical assault. I just got onto the internet to look up the definition of ‘tantamount’ after having included it in the previous sentence. I indeed used it correctly, yet it took me four minutes to accomplish the task because the internet is never, no, I do not want to get into this argument about time wasting, but how, in this form of composition, directly onto the keys, do I treat these things I choose not to, these threads I choose not to lay out toward the heart of the labyrinth, do I abandon them midstride, do I delete them secretly, a covert diversion from my fluid posturing, what of typographical errors, I believe I just answered that myself when typing ‘typographical’ starting with a ‘y’ instead of a ‘t’ and returning to fix it. This cannot compare. This is a world of distractions, this electric world, this world of comfortable beds and stocked kitchens, of warm soft cats and more books than at which a stick could be shook, and on these keys I do not feel the same sparing quality of each word. The visual precision of watching these characters fill the screen fights with my urge to blurt and traipse by creating such pristine crispness in the text. My sloppy handwriting is perhaps the ideal editor, and perhaps, after this brief experiment, which no doubt will resurface in the next twenty-three (23) pages of notes, I should retire to the yellow armchair to annotate in pencil, the next few sheets before I am distracted by my bed.