chase scenes serial #5
to turn on the air conditioner under the window and check out for the night. Who knows where I shall start again tomorrow, perhaps where I land, or perhaps I shall return to Bismarck, that is the beauty of such a French process, no? No, I just got out of the pool again. I tried to think about that other indoor pool but I guess you can only do it once, then if you write about it that pretty much kills it.‡ I did think, on the long walk today, about what I should write when I got back tonight. All I could think about was laying bare this process, and saying, no, writing things like “you see?” It always began to take on this didactic turn in my thoughts, addressing the readerly ‘you,’ but not in an inclusive way. Perhaps I cannot write inclusively, or ‘for’ anyone. When I did it last summer in South Dakota it sounds like ‘What did you do this summer?’ Like my travelogue to the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, complete with my autograph, no, not my autograph, complete with the autograph of the manager of the Travelodge in Slidell. They did not have a pool there. I remember that being tremendously upsetting for my sister and myself. I don’t think the Travelodge chain has ever really resecured, or recovered, rather, from that letdown in my eyes. If I were to see a Travelodge next to a Motel 6 or Knight’s Inn I would
‡ I’m sitting on a chair in my living room that is from my grandparents’ house. I have been back in Atlanta for two days. I have spent the past two nights typing until after one AM (1AM) on this project which I schemed to abandon handwritten in a kelly green Mead notebook. After typing out this text and reading it several times I have clearly concluded not to abandon it. In fact, I am quite intrigued about this additional concurrent footer, which I think will by virtue of its paratextual convention, be sheet bound, whereas the body narrative, although logorrheic, is free to roam from sheet to sheet. The danger I foresaw is real. The text eats my time while drawings lay unfinished on the board to my right, and the materials that spawned this text grow ephemeral yet strangely more clear, precise. Back in my comfort zone, I see all of the fragments and locales in a similar light to the intrusive memories that plagued the writing on the trip, they are the stuff of my past opened to analysis and perhaps my fear of ‘taking it home with me’ was that even the most recent memories from the trip, the ones I feared would disintegrate if not reduced to words, and whose absence from the remainder of the above flowing narrative forms the most pressing reason to continue working down here, would, immediately upon landing, posses the critical gloss of my armchair autobiographer’s perspective.