I attempted to sell the real house to a guy who liked jumping up the walls in the big empty room. He was very gymnastic and could grab onto the slightest ledge and pull himself into the ceiling. I am a motivated seller.

Part of me thinks that it’s not selling because I don’t want to give it up, even though I have no use for it and it’s an albatross hung around the neck of my budget. I am not aware of my budget having committed a hunting crime.

Then we were all back in a mountain town setting up some kind of exhibition in the back of a public space. Everyone who had signed up to come had a book with their name inside waiting for them. But it was all rather rushed, because a splinter group would not be attending. Instead we were going up the mountain.

I know that we took at least one Subaru. There were amazing thick silver bridges in the snow. This detail put me in mind of the future real town–could the exhibition have been there? There’s not enough data and I remain dubious.

Once we got up, one guy took the stove and made breakfast, but just for himself. It looked really good (there were eggs), and people started to wonder who would use the stove next.

But there was work to do. The lines on the door of the cabin had to be counted precisely. I took on the job, with only the barest conception of why.

There is truth inside these scenes, but here too, I only have bare conceptions.

Back in allegedly waking life, the chill wind has finally died back. Yesterday was a distracted wasteland. Tomorrow is back to work in a tentative way. And so today is the middle ground in which I try to, as the saying goes, extract my head from a nether region. Clear the fog and the laundry basket. Put myself back up onto the rails, which allow for no distracted deviation in the pathway up the mountain, but at least there is forward motion and the dim suggestion of progress.

Amen.

Appendix: A spammer pushing something called tribal loans offers this offhanded gem.
“Loneliness seems to have become the great American disease.” The tribal loaner attributes it to “Jοhn Corry”. In searching it out there are many links to more spam. But there’s also a page that says: Not John Corry.

Rachel Corrie. Who was she?

It’s a shame that I didn’t remember immediately.

It raises a lot of political questions. I fall back instead to a philosophical one: does the road that the spammer sent me down constitute distraction, or is it a righteous part of the art?