I guess there is a type of person who is highly empathetic and understanding, but standoffish, and averse to getting involved - even to the point of allowing situations to fall apart and on their face. That is an interesting type of person who I have nothing in common with.

I went to the city today. I've done that before. It didn't come to anything then, and generally ends with the reminder that you ought to save some spirit for the walk back to the car. And so I went today, with enough remembrance to not expect anything specific and enough ignorance to watch for anything at all. Some sights I will keep in heart not worth the fare. Well, I mean...

Some imagery that's been bouncing around in the back of the wallet for a few weeks - a base on Umbriel, the Uranian moon. Umbriel has a low albedo - dark grey rock, snow blotches. Was imagining some stained glass insects, dragonflies or butterflies, hanging from doors and windows of buildings there. Bare unmanned worlds are easy to invite simple imagery like that. There's no life or community on Umbriel to demand more thorough wisdom than some garden mementos, some boggly forest chimes. Kind of like an internet forum. People can charter an internet community with a rather abstract or personal mission statement or aesthetic - maybe scattered solar system bases could be like that too.

Maybe that illustrates my Quixotic frame of mind that I can't shake. I want a Cowboy Bebop solar system - where a human has the freedom to soar into fanastic strange environments, but these fantastic strange environments, in their divine magnanimity, condescend to take human life as a charge - the human can bum around a craterlip truckstop or carry on a struggling Rhean shrimp business. The human can drive into the city and find something to do.

I don't know if I will ever shake the delusion that there are giants waiting for me. That delusion has been chasing my tail forever. There are giants waiting, giants to fight, giants to kill, giants to befriend, giants to get married to, giants to explore, to explore with, giants to discover giants with, giants giants giants. Titans. Dragons. Dragons, serpents, great crocodiles to wrestle. It's not a metaphor, it's about crocodiles. It's not a metaphor, it's about Titan.

The world holds two things up at the same time, and they have nothing to do with each other, certainly nothing to do with me. It holds a floral-patterned white blanket up, warmth and frigid to the touch, encamped in the steeple storeroom of a winter New England schoolhouse. So vivid I can smell it, importunately suggesting I was actually there and I'm just now remembering, like how one night the sunlit squares of pecan pie on the church kitchen counter, one fifteen-year-old-morning, flex into immediate view. Then it holds up a blanket, hot carseat and blue felt. Sunlight streams through and lights up the frayed threads and the floating dust. Long lion-flanked steps, tricornes overhead casting sundial spikes on the marble, and colossal-type letters dedicated above the great bronze bell. Latin, palm tree, rocket, roller coaster air. All that power, that fluidness, that shining facility, at my doorstep? The address seems to be slightly wrong.

They actually have to do with each other, everything to do with each other. In one Russian writer's life, fir sunglades, imperial winters, exile, Cape Cod, snowcaps in Arizona. I must have been on a sullen camping trip with the Boy Scouts one weekend in some white woods, saw some canoes shedded by a frozen pond, felt the blanket. Been in the backseat driving through Virginia, playing Superstar Saga, had a dehydration headache, felt the sunlight. Now it will never leave - one after another, daydream by daydream, fanciful scene after scene I've never attended, but could never nearly imagine. They smile and fall back and collapse into each other like some kind of smug immaculate jewel. It's rude.

All is there in Kakariko. Music by Koji Kondo, sun shines through every window and aspiration right through to me. The foremen shout from the rooftops. They are rude.

It'll always continue. I'll pass by some ground floor window and see the houseplant inside and I'll wonder. I'll see silhouettes in the tower cab through the overhanging glass and I'll become incredibly concerned. The castle rushes up from the asphalt, draws itself up, cloaks itself, glares down with owl eyes. Then it gets old and forgetful, gentle and weed-riven, grey; guard slips. Then the sky rends and the light pierces through, and reminds and reminds and reminds and reminds and reminds. For an instant, regrettably, I understand what it's like to know the old days while you're still in them. The casualty repeats itself. Cause of death: komorebi grapeshot.

I was thinking that life's proposals of romance have to be handled somehow. They come, looked for or no. When looked for, after the taste and flutter and ensuing deflating lack of direction, it's easiest to chastise oneself for the vanity of the attempt. But sometimes it comes by unlooked for, sometimes. Solicited or soliciting, the same disconcerting smile exists in the same world, and the world is suffused with visible light. So it must be reckoned with in the end. How to manage? It's like being dropped into a play that seems to have a lot of romantic scenes, without being informed of your lines or part. Or it's like kicking around on a big dark stage year by year, gradually becoming dubious that there is actually a production happening tonight and here, then a spot wheels and the flash of filled seats, the murmuring hum of the air, and the urgent hissing from the wings become somewhat sensible all at once.

What is the called for part? Somehow, I must act in the genre. Hedging for a farce will not work. It would be easier if it was a play about floundering in the red selling shrimps and butterfly trinkets after all or an urbane commentary on isolation or a Punch and Judy show about assaulting crocodiles. It's not a farce or a comedy or even a tragic melodrama. Terrifyingly, horribly, mortified and stricken white, it will be seen what is written on the golden ribbons that run round the Gabriel horn. With a groan that matches the best violent efforts of lost-boy childhood to shirk the moving loving world, realization sets in and the note blasts grave and triumphant. The climax is nothing other than a heart straining until it bleeds. The final scene is a wedding. It's a kissing book.

Well, that's fine. My expression of reluctance is a little latent anyway. Discouragement and then consolation roll by like a hilly landscape. Here's a picture of hilly landscape.

And here's a picture of Looty Pijamini, a woodcarver artist based out of Grise Fiord, Nunavut.

I found this picture on Wikipedia a long time ago, and I found it fascinating how it was important and public enough to be on wikipedia but so crystallinely full of utterly mundane and private things. A windex bottle - Grise Fiord artist Looty Pijamini's windex bottle. That plastic tray you put paint-water in. A square of tarp with a bunch of copper hinges. A roll of Bounty towels propping up a floral-patterned white cushion. It has the strange feeling of casually stepping through space and time to a be right in front of this very specific place. And the obscurity in plain sight - all these indispensible things that look like they smell like an early memory, thought about by probably very few people. I think about a similar thing when I see hi-res photos of Solar system bodies. When New Horizons flew by Pluto and countless surface features became revealed to humanity all at once, I kept thinking that this hill or glacial berg or nitrogen glade can't have been noticed much by a human before, even by other people looking at the images. There are tens of thousands of details, after all, in those images. Some day, hundreds of years in the future, will there be someone in that spot? Inceremoniously touched in thought first by me. I think that human life starting in a new place would have to carry what the ochre hands on cave walls carry. A note that begins and remains and remains, dyeing time like oxygen. Your, uh, stained glass shrimp shop. Eventually, in the firmament, like an aurora. Guessed by me, earlier, like the wall of the cave guessed once by the Devonian feet of a surreptitious gecko. I don't know.