Title:

12:16 am

p. 475. Eric Clipperton, gaspers, Lyle licking sweat, Pat Montesian's stroke-induced physical liabilities, Gately and the Nothingness product of a Higher Power search, Gately giving off signs of "Street" and "Jail" to the residents of the homeless shelter where he works as a janitor responding to incontinence in resident showers and schizoid stench in interpersonal reactions, Calvin Thrust, Eschaton disasters (the snow is the weather, which is not actually real in Eschaton's game-theory-driven ontology), Bob Hope, Marathe and Steeply on a ridge overlooking Arizona desert like an early 21st century reincarnation of Waiting for Godot but with "deep cover" intelligence organization connections, why don't I remember how Axford lost a finer and a half, and does Schtitt listen to opera, and so on.

All this has something to do with the book, but it tells little about what occurs at the level of the sentence.

I am listening to Chet Baker, Live at Colorado, 1966, and drinking can after can of Budweiser Select. Ravioli in the stomach is quietly digesting and my face's reflection in the mirror has the late summer sheen of years gone by. Roger on the Marlboro Lights and the strange satisfaction following a shift to nocturnal patterns.

For the ten weeks I lived in London during autumn 01 I roomed with a Europhile history major named Rowan who cheated on his girlfriend in our room with a girl named Leslie and led me to issue threats of physical violence, which I would have realized, when he turned the channel from 8th inning, Game 6, Diamondbacks-Yankees, to check on a Premier League soccer score. Rowan waxed poetic about the historical character of the streets we roamed and got a strange glint in his eye when he talked about how easy it was for him to imagine the historical epochs towards which our collective academic energies were directed. From his discursive mutterings, I got the idea that he could actually picture the past in something like precise detail, which ability always eluded me. I write this because it seems easier for me to imagine the particular world incarnated in these pages than it does to imagine, say, the world that existed during peanut farmer Carter's reign. Anyway . . .