last night we had hockey seats second row from the glass, right by the faceoff dot

but before that in the afternoon iris and i went to the public library. it's right by the shelter so residents spend days in and around the library, often you encounter some really desperate or unwell people in there. we galloped up the claustrophobic stairwell to get a lydia davis book from the 3rd floor and a 60s-ish man in plaid flannel shirt and filthy ambiguous pants was shuffling along the 2nd-floor landing, chin jutting, lower lip curled over upper, eyes unfixed and unfocused, a lot like a windup toy and moving about as fast, but we whirled around to the steps up from there, we were racing. found the book and then went to the patricia highsmith books so i could tell iris about why i stopped reading her stories, we were up there maybe ten minutes. back down, the man was still on the landing, about 3 feet farther along than he'd been when we ascended past, but now stopped, exactly hunched, and the security officer next to him with a same hunch to look up into his empty face, and a frayed librarian on his other side looking plaintively at the security officer's face, all 3 a tableaux but of what, but we whirled down the next set of steps to the circulation desk, we were racing

when you get to see hockey that closely, it is a different sport, it isn't even a sport anymore, you watch individuals in the game situation of a moment. i could see the sweat on cam ward's face through the gaps in his mask, and how calm he is even when the action is in his crease, he's always that loose, he doesn't have to summon it, or release tension by skating around like most goalies do, he wastes nothing

i also saw how remarkable a skater and thinker marian gaborik is, he moves differently from every player out there, it's really more like flying, like a hawk. he took a puck off the boards at his own blue line, tucked one leg behind him for a stride in order to avoid contact with the player he picked, then promptly pumped up ice for two strides blowing past a defenseman before he could react, and while accelerating like this with head up glanced to each side to locate teammates, just flashed his eyes and knew everyone and their velocities and trajectories, made the hurricanes' blue line and shifting back down to a glide dropped the puck to one side, lifting his skate to let the puck scud directly beneath it, meanwhile the defenseman has only just reacted to his acceleration and turned scrabbling to catch up so now gaborik drops instantly back behind him and becomes suddenly open as he drifts again on one skate laterally into the slot, vaclav prospal is the trailer and moves into the space that gaborik made for him at the top of the circle, prospal pauses and then steps into a shot as if he's going to slap one on net but instead flicks a wrist shot along the ice into the slot at gaborik, meanwhile gaborik has planted the foot that had been raised to allow the drop pass and shoves the shaft of his stick down along that leg, to deflect and lift prospal's shot straight on net. but ward gets enough of his elbow out to send the puck to the corner, gaborik sees this even before ward makes the save and releases the plant foot to keep his previous drift trajectory into the corner, catches the puck just as it comes off the boards to flick it into the confusion of skates in the crease, but ward has taken everything away down low, and waits excruciatingly patiently with his glove poised and open like a child holding a bug jar until the puck jumps against him and then he covers it for the whistle

ward and gaborik were smooth and everyone else was choppy, even eric staal, who is secretly a power player, not a finesse player like people think. staal plays annoyed more than he plays angry, he doesn't look like he enjoys the game, i bet his eyebrows cramp

lydia davis slides from a sentence to a sentence. you wonder if they're really sentences, if you're chasing something that's a move or two ahead of you through lanes

a terribly old woman walks in my neighborhood every afternoon at the same time i retrieve iris from school. frail, blanched. friday she was a block away, hunched even more awkwardly than usual and a bit to one side, holding the side of her head. i felt a rush of panic that she was experiencing a seizure and doubled my pace but as quickly saw that she was cradling a cell phone against her face with both hands, shuffling along the curb, talking, smiling. and then i was in the park, feeling the gushy slide of sodden mud under my feet as i climbed up to glendale ave and the chuffing car line

i like to imagine that i can see inside of things. but then i still have to drive the car and so forth

the park stays soggy all year

i think gaborik rarely has his weight on more than one foot

i'm a mucker

second straight day under complete cloud cover, unvariegated dimness yesterday, thick mist this morning. i've been ill

this morning read a long conversation with john yau about his new book on jasper johns' work. also watched blue velvet again this weekend and saw ten or so 4minute warhol screen test films. and now thinking about how few subjects i actually have written about, almost without exception, over the last 20 years, the first self-reflexive poem i wrote was in 9th grade. but to see how lynch recombines and uses light, darkness, passages from one space to another (often outer to inner); warhol cultivates ambivalence to the medium as well as its craft; and johns repeats images and objects, it's reassuring

in the picasso & language show, an idea occurred about how to respond to brent's critique that my obedience manuscript needs a perhaps radical formal intervention or deployment in order to slow the page-reading to the pace of my aloud-readings. also a page-numbering idea that makes sense to me. i really automatically have a sense of a book as a place or space, it's never transparent

listening to co-workers across the hall complain about the notation transition from BC/AD to BCE/CE

i have trouble appreciating pine trees, though i know colleen appreciates them. what do i see at first, the individual pine tree or a representative of the category "pine tree?"

i think i have one wittgensteinian eye and one lynchian eye, and a johns hand

thick rectilinear cloudbank in front of rising sun this morning, scorching top edge to a blind vinculum

is all humor dark humor?

i've been doing a lot of business lately, negotiating contract terms with data vendors, shuttling technical information back and forth with engineers and editors, it's depleting and also it's communication that can lack ambiguity and come to a decisive and successful conclusion

pointless, too. the underground chatter of ants, infinitesimal clicking mandibles

have you received more emails than kisses, this year?

i'm just moving things along, glacially

so i've been singing a lot lately. a lot. enough that i know my patterns and my many limitations

the big thing is that i kind of don't really sing, it's more like loud talking or yelling. the sound is coming from a clamped-closed throat rather than a lungs or diaphragm. i've been trying to figure this out in the car but i think that i can't because i'm sitting down when i'm in the car

also i have been quiet a lot. not even thinking. my new house has a good thing going with the living room windows and their sills and the couch

also i've been having the strange headaches again and i need to be careful

brent wrote me that the obedience manuscript needs something to score the reading off the page to be as much like the reading aloud of it that i do. so i have been thinking about impediments, slowness, stillness, betweenness, interstices

i keep thinking about the zombie lurch, painting my face white and stumbling around town in the dark groaning. not paying attention to anything, or hearing any internal voice. just groaning

i've been procrastinating things, even things i want to do. everything has to wait until something else is done first and it's all tangled up

it's incredible how much i get in my own way. but this could be average too

boredom has been pleasant enough, if it's really boredom

anyway i'm not putting any ornaments on my christmas tree. it's just going to be a tree

smeary milky sky, skies lately, last night smashed charcoal seen above church roof, mornings a quilted layer making sun look egg-like

first twilight angles really about 4pm now, then the decline but the turning point seeming very close to darkness rather than stretching the awfulness of sunset out

condensation has been freezing on storm windows and around the perimeter of the condensation patches sometimes stellar frost with broad bevels

listening repetitively to a few recordings, tried to stay balanced by scattering them amidst a mix cd but i just click ahead to the particular tracks and listen often 20 or more times in a row

structure and form for some reason now kind of hurt, so stuck reconciling clarity with unintentionality, making ambiguous false starts, words seem heavy and impossible to hold onto

or rather, literality hurts lately

have always felt that artists use "intuitive" to cover up lameness, lack of forethought, lack of skill, sloppiness and so forth but there might be another area there

anyway, getting a lot of ideas and passing on them all, instantly

ideas don't seem worthwhile categorically

list things that seem worthwhile: flying/swinging, dirt, shovels, licking/tasting/sucking, windows, doors, springs, destroying, miniatures

collage and its variants are a good next step

or writing on the air

seems like photographing is running out for me

being warm is better than all of this put together

clouds and sun seen this morning while driving 147 out of downtown . a pile of shreds in the sky, swept together for the dustpan, with sun behind, showing while blasts between, around, and through folded opacities ranging down into dark grey . not appearing overall a still shot of a boiling sky, but a carefully piled mass of tatters . and sharp diagonal shafts blazing down out of the bottom of the mass . sunday, walking to the grocery store with iris and sadie, a stick of a woman approached us shakily . her eyes were turgid ponds . gravity pulled the skin down her face, her pulse vacuum-sealed it against her skeleton from within . she spoke hungrily but her request didn't much dent the humid air between us

yesterday morning iris and i were leaving sadie's preschool walking to the car across a short stretch of macadam path bright with morning sun . a lengthy earthworm moved languidly on the asphalt, inches from the safety of lawn, unaware of it . i bent down, keys in hand, to flip it into the grass . the instant i touched it, it entered into rapid convulsions, projecting its body fully into the air and skittering around the top surface like a spastic wind-up toy . we were taken aback, even revulsed

then in the afternoon i got take-out at a middle eastern place . with my styrofoam box, i walked along the back of the restaurants, their mops and rice cookers and chairs for waiters to smoke in, to the point where this rear access road meets the parking lot of the building in which i work . i approached a black limo half in the shade of a dense buffer of mostly sweet gum trees, and could see the back of the driver, in his white shirt and cap he was leaning against the front bumper of the car . as i passed i looked over, his black driver's pants were around his ankles and he was pissing on the pavement, his brown, hairy legs in full sun and view . he looked over at me and chucked his chin up in a single nod of hello, expressionless, otherwise frozen, his yellow piss arcing down to its spatter

then last night, sitting on the concrete driveway out front of the space with brian and ken after a listless tecate noir session, talking over desires and options under swifts returning to the agriculture extension building's chimney, i saw down the hill appear around the corner of the auto parts storefront a silver fox . at first it was a large cat to my eye, the way it moved, but then i thought it was a misshapen dog because its head tapered to a nose like an afghan . brian and ken confirmed it was a fox, they'd seen it around before chasing rabbits, and indeed a rabbit was scampering toward us and across the street to the safety of underbrush . the fox stopped upon noticing us, relaxed, put its nose to the ground briefly, casually turned, and went back behind the building, it did not particularly care about the rabbit's escape . its afterimage: body was tapered, looking longer than it should be for its head, the tail seemed too full for the body again, an alien or hybrid form, as if head, body, and tail were on spinners on a slot machine, a composite image with no payoff . then the fox reappeared, fur shining faintly, looking for the rabbit, the rabbit was gone though . it stepped without purpose into the street beneath a streetlamp, bolting invisibly into shadows only when a car approached from around the old ballpark