August 5, 2024

$40,000. Gone from the market. Didn’t know there was a panic, and still don’t know the cause. See the red numbers, turn the computer off.

Y first thing. Nothing made much of an impression. What occupied my mind? 

Made major inroads in the streetside weeds. Something stung me memorably. I thought it was yellowjackets, but none were visible. The only other candidate was nettles, but they too were invisible. Surprisingly distracting. I want to hit the weeds again today, wondering if I can endure long sleeves. 

Dinner with DJ, the first actual meal I’ve had since Minneapolis. 

Most of my days spent watching the Olympics. I tell myself it’s OK because it’s only every four years. Thought for an hour that if I wanted to be an Olympic athlete, it might be in the steeplechase. My health was so bad from the start that it’s difficult even to conceive of that kind of mastery over gravity and inertia. I have never won a race, seldom even completed one, but I am (or was) curiously strong, and remember an episode of British Bulldog on the playground at Betty Jane. Almost everyone had been caught, and so almost everyone was in the center trying to bring the survivors down. I was one of the survivors, at the end the only one, and yet they– the big boys, the athletes and all– couldn’t tackle me. I kept plowing forward. I thought about that in class afterward, wondering what exactly was going on. The boys who couldn’t tackle me looked at me strangely for a while. Now everyone has forgotten except me, I suppose, and whatever the lesson was has never been fully revealed. Maybe that my victories would be anomalous, without context, lead to nothing.