text: sovay | 2019-03-25
  You'd better color up my heart again
  I used to read imperviously on all forms of public transit. Increasingly I find myself just watching the world as it goes past, I worry as if I'm afraid it'll disappear or I will. This evening there was a cyclorama sunset just starting as the bus came up over the top of Winter Hill, long sandbars of cloud as precise as pastels in grey and blue and cream-gold. I watched it instead of reading more than the first ten pages of Henry Green's Party Going (1939), which I got from Raven Used Books with the last of the gift certificate from nineweaving.
  I think I passed briefly through an M. John Harrison novel on my way out of the bookstore. A youngish white-haired man in a dark coat with a dramatically bright scarf—my memory thinks in the fuchsia range—had been talking to the clerk about existentialist philosophers; he stepped aside and I had to explain the multiply crossed-out and recalculated gift certificate and in the meantime an older woman in a beige raincoat suddenly began talking to the man, very loudly and distinctly. I thought for a moment I was overhearing a play. "No spies," she said. "We have no spies in this country. Haven't you noticed? Nobody whose business—" and then the clerk was handing me change for the dollar extra and I lost her for a moment. I can't describe her accent with any more precision than mostly British; her hair was short and I think not a natural brown. I would have placed her age above my mother's. As I put the book away in my computer bag and moved past the two of them to the door, she was saying to the man, who had not interrupted her, "You're too young to remember, but after the last war . . ." Imagine my brain hitting a record scratch. Which last war? Have we had a last war? I thought we just had a kind of perpetual one going on. What decade was this conversation taking place in anyway? What country that doesn't have spies? I was already out the door of the bookstore. I still don't know.
  I was in Harvard Square to meet a_reasonable_man. We went to Café Gato Rojo; he showed me family photographs and told me stories while I drank herbal chai. Afterward I caught up with spatch on his break and we had dinner from the Pokéworks in Davis while listening to various sound effects from Us (2019). The Broadway Bridge is now closed for the Green Line Extension, so the 89 bus detours by way of Highland instead of coming straight through Ball Square. I keep meaning to see what's left of my walking route to the library, but I have been saddened enough by the gutting and dismantling of the old Reid & Murdock warehouse, the concrete lion's face above its lintel long gone. Every time I hear the MBTA-recorded announcement about "bridge work," I hear it as one word and think of dentistry.
  For various obscure reasons we are now the owners of a Roku Ultra. Anyone who can tell me how to be sure that I have turned off motion smoothing on it will have my eternal gratitude. I found instructions for a Roku TV, but they do not appear to apply to our box. I miss dumb technology.