this week i


bought six eggs at the shack two doors down.  the rusted metal cage had been nearly empty, so there's always a risk.  started cracking them into a teacup, not directly into frying pan.  halfway through, pitch black oozed out, there's always a risk.  muscle reflex threw it to the trash before gag reflex demanded evacuation.  i held down my morning coffee, opened the doors to let the house breathe, paid abebech four dollars to wash the odor off the bin.  always a risk.

turned thirty five.

am trying to do push-ups here.

read milan kundera's book of laughter and forgetting.
 
the only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.  they are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten

they made him feel like a grandmaster who has just finished off two opponents on adjoining chessboards

she also tried to conjure up all the pet names he had ever called her.  her real name he used only for the first two weeks or so.  his tenderness was like a machine for churning out terms of endearment.  as quickly as they seemed to wear, he would make up new ones for her.  during the twelve years they had known each other, she had had twenty or thirty of them, each one belonging to a definite period in their lives.
but how can she reconstruct the lost link between a pet name and the rhythm of time?  only in rare instances does she succeed.  she can remember the days after her mother's death, for example, when, as if trying to wake her from a dream, her husband whispered her name into her ear with great urgency (her name at that time and that moment).  that name she remembers perfectly, and she can enter it with confidence under the year 1964.  but all the other names are soaring freely, madly, outside time, like birds escaped from an aviary

love is a constant interrogation.  in fact, i don't know a better definition of love

8/24

this week i

worked on the statistics textbook.

disagree with nobel laureate amartya sen's proposed revisions to america's voting system.  the electoral college cordons off nationwide recounts in close elections.  the public needs to understand how votes are counted, a fatal flaw of most decision-ranking algorithms.  switch to approval voting, leave indirect election be.

sat down for a game. i cut my deck to the queen of spades but the cards were all the same.

8/17

this week i

came home and a second dog had died in as many days.  with the puppy, three for the week.  the survivor who they call jacques did not take notice, still nibbling and licking and at play.  landlord said maid said vet said poisoned, neighborhood boys throw contaminated meat over the gate.  i saw the vaccination certificate, in ge'ez alphabet.  $200 for a five-course prophylaxis at the western clinic, but i was paying for a good night's sleep.

but i'm trying ringo, i'm trying real hard to be the shepherd

watched the world go by.  an unattended donkey walked past in the evening, an elderly man greeted me with bongiorno the next morning.

wore a shirt in amharic.  now the literate ones yell what it says instead of, "china."  junkyards in the developing world have been picked bone-dry.

8/10

this week i

never know if it's a miswak or a joint until i get closer.

see through the political theater.  the president shits on 15,000 transgendered people in the military, i'll continue donating to the aclu but make no mistake: last tuesday's lead story was forty-plus republicans voting to rescind health insurance coverage from millions of americans.

woke up, fed the hounds, ate broccoli, walked to work, watched it die.  does scaramucci miss his deleted tweets or his ex-wife more?

8/3