FRIDAY morning Jan 27
Ordered the gout book prematurely, then. And the gout diet. Called Mid-state and the uric acid results in the blood test are normal but that still does not necessarily rule out atypical gout. Called the podiatrist back to see what a visit to him will yield. Still might follow the gout diet ideas anyway. One page said that guys who drink lots of coffee do not get gout! So more coffee is a fine idea.
Really icy yucky day out. Paula is here now though. Her sister’s husband had a logging accident two weeks ago—cut into the tendons of his thighs. Awwggh. Don’t even want to hear such reports. But she’s taking him back to Florida and leaving Paula to take care of trying to see the dad’s house.
We saw the Wild Swans production last night. Children’s Theater. Nice production. Learned from Rosen by chance that Bunk was eased out at the high school last spring. A sort of Final Straw event between her and Parsons is how Lorie Eaton described it to me at the Peppercorn.
So with gout now out I guess the podiatrist is going to discover that it is a kind of sprain or stress created by these new flat zero drop shoes. Like a new convert, however, I refuse to buy into that. Even against my own better judgment? Maybe. I could wear those saucony shoes that look like the older running shoes and just say Oh I tend to prefer a sort of minimalist type shoe. See what he says to that. Better to cast it like that rather than Announce the new zero drop dispensation. In fact I guess I could experiment with wearing those shoes around the house and see what might happen to that left foot and toe with the re-addition of a slight heel.
It could happen that not too far from the railway station, but far enough, I would come upon some solitary person walking through the empty streets—under such circumstances, tailing another person was impossible, because in those neighborhoods the itineraries are too short, and especially because I had no way of dissembling or fading into a landscape as barren and quiet as that, both of us, walker and pursuer, would be the only living creatures in the desert, and thus too visible, etc.—and so it could happen that if I saw someone in the empty streets, I’d feel an initial impulse to follow him at a discreet distance, but in the end I’d give up on it; the very desolation of the neighborhood would override any argument and conviction. It was as if the desire for adventure, for fiction to a certain extent, as I explained just now, which had originated someplace as a variant of curiosity, had dissolved before assuming any true form.
The atmosphere on the outskirts of the city turned out to be both intimate and alien to me; I could recognize the language, since I shared it, but I’d lost a bit—or a great deal, I don’t know—of the pulse of its expressions and of the local idiom in general, its resonances. And so these birthday walks were approximate in more than one sense. My birthdays consisted of vague gestures of this type, an exile for a few hours toward a part of the past and toward a geographic area that no longer belonged to me, but because they’d been mine once, I had considered them united until that moment: both parts were one and the same, a mixture of time and place. When the day was nearly over, I’d return from the outskirts as if I were coming back not from another reality, but rather, from a brother planet, an outlandish dimension into which I could set foot only once a year, when the calendar, underscoring my presence, so to speak, in the world, invited me by this same operation to suspend that presence, to doubt it, or at least, to hide it.
Page(s): 186-187, My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec, Margaret B. Carson and Enrique B. Vila-Matas, Open Letter
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