In the tunnel fear grips me, a dog. Whenever I die in videogames or drive like an idiot, little prickles run - starting at the feet then up up to my forehead. 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. He said there's been a guy who walks by every day and holds eye contact through the window. He doesn't know what to do about it. I said he should contort his face or smear fake blood on his clothes. Coworker seems hesitant to implement these ideas. The daily staring contest must be excruciatingly intimate; it isn't something you wouldn't want to ruin so quickly.
In the last part of my drive, I 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, V-shaped flight pattern, I am parallel to the road, jealous of them. Congruently: the bridge's bent figure, seen at a distance, the silhouette of a man kneeled, keeled over, in prayer. If the day is dull, it is 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. We buried a pet cat somewhere in the front yard when I was in 1st grade. I remember watching my dad dig the hole, being surprised at how deep and wide it was. I biked up an down the street while he dug, fearful that our neighbors would think we were burying a dead human. I worried about the brother cat he left behind, I couldn't really tell them apart and regularly swapped their names. I wasn't really sure which one we were burying. As long as the other cat lived I still swapped the names, as if the other brother was just in the other room. When the alternate cat-self died, the brother stopped witnessing himself as a double.
Today, the receptionist says "TGIF" in a 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 facing the 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.
On my drive home I see a hummer limousine on the freeway.
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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, though he can probably see everything on my screen) and whenever someone walks by my desk I quickly click into excel.
Ok time for lunch, thanks for reading.
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