This morning, after unlocking the door and scooting into the driver seat, I watched, for 10 minutes or so, fresh dew accumulate on the windshield. I was 15 minutes late to work. I left a container of yogurt on my desk and the smell urges me to google something loathsome. Any hopeful internal mantra is crushed.
In the tunnel fear grips me like a dog. Whenever I die in videogames or drive like an idiot little prickles run over my body - starting at the feet then up up to my forehead. Driving by myself I always speed and make rageful faces so that people who cut me off can see me angry in their rear view mirrors. My coworker told me about the strip of grass in front of his house, how kids always play on it and look into his big living room window, how it creeps him out. He said there's been a guy, a grown guy, who walks by every day and holds eye contact through the window every time. He doesn't know what to do about it. I said that when the guy looks at him he should contort his face into something creepy or smear fake blood on his clothes. My coworker seems hesitant to implement these ideas. I could imagine the daily staring contest as excruciatingly intimate, as something you wouldn't want to ruin so quickly.
The mountain, in the distance, reveals itself differently every day: brilliant cumulonimbus clouds pierced by 8am light choke the base, fog, like dust, settles over the summit. The perception of the whole landscape oscillates between biblical reverence and muggy anonymity. You could exalt it or smear it away. Today it is plain and flat, a cardboard set for a western film.
In the last segment of my drive, I always move to the far left lane so I can look at a waterway underneath a bridge. The bridge smells of ammonia and rain. The nested swallows would maybe see it as a god. Congruently: the structure's bent figure, seen at a distance, makes it out to be the silhouette of a man kneeled in prayer. If it's a brightly lit morning, you can imagine the bridge bowing to the mountain. If the day is dull, I see it as a horse, tethered to the stake, legs go straight down, its back flat and warmed. Driving beneath the bridge, I thought I saw a woman up there, waving two orange flags, crossing her arm in an X, uncrossing them. Crossing the arms in an X, uncrossing them.
Further along the freeway there is a dead house cat. He's a fattened creature with fine white fur, now matted in some places. The black asphalt made a fantastic sunning spot. This is only the second time I've seen a cat gunned down on the road, even with all the missing cat signs stapled to the telephone poles. We buried a pet cat somewhere in the front yard when I was in 1st grade. I remember watching my dad dig the hole and being surprised at how deep and wide it was, it didn't feel like a cat needed that much space underground. I biked up an down the street while he dug, fearful that our neighbors would think we were burying a dead body. I worried about the brother cat he left behind, worried because I couldn't really tell them apart and regularly swapped their names. I wasn't really sure which one we were burying, which one of the brother cats had died. As long as the other cat lived I still swapped the names, as if the other brother was just in the other room, hiding under the couch. I wonder now if I psychologically fucked up the surviving cat, maybe he believed that his brother was not really his brother but an alternate self living an alternate reality alongside him. When the alternate cat-self died, the brother stopped witnessing himself as a double, and instead became a merge of both realities. I could see that being very confusing.
Today, the receptionist says "TGIF" in a complete monotone to everyone entering the office. In the kitchen she tells me about the stream she lives next to, about the foxes in her yard, her insomnia. She usually wakes around 4am and stands at the living room window admiring her yard; yesterday she watched a fox kill a squirrel and got so upset she closed the curtains (tight) for the rest of the day and felt complicated feeling towards her house cat. I think about telling my coworker this story as an excellent example of how to get rid of pesky people staring at you through living room windows.
The fox didn't like the intimate eye contact, it made a rageful face so that the receptionist could see it angry, it reminded her that foxes are brutes.
On my drive home I see a hummer limousine on the freeway, someone cuts me off and I'm too tired to make an angry face. I'm reminded that humans are brutes.
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It's hard to feel like you have anything interesting to say, is what I think (a lot) while peering into the computer at my desk, drawing pictures of fruits and vegetables. It's hard to know what to say at all, is what I assume the carrots and pumpkins think, peering back at me. I'm typing this blog post on the clock on my work computer (sorry! hope my boss doesn't ever find this) and whenever someone walks by my desk I quickly click over to photoshop or illustrator so I appear to them as a productive employee. La di da just editing a photo, nothing to see here. I have a secret fear that one day my coworkers and bosses will find out that I spend a lot of random time poking around the internet while at work, and that they'll be like: why are you 5 pages deep on Russian espionage Wikipedia and listening to podcasts about little gray foxes, you're supposed to be writing something about local farmers.
Ok time for lunch, thanks for reading.
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