trying to set down my foot just this side of the yellow line that seems to be dead center on the track, i'm thinking about the black surface under my feet. i'm thinking black black yellow black black. you can call this a thought. i'm thinking about the two big hawks i saw yesterday up on the high-tension tower - nowhere tonight. i'm thinking i shouldn't have eaten so many bits of chicken for dinner because i knew i'd be out here bouncing it around now.

and over on the baseball field they're dragging that thing, that sled or whatever over the infield, raising a monumental cloud of dust despite the guy with the hose. i'm thinking that the cat's doing better and i'm glad. we've been getting the pills down pretty quick, relatively painless. but if i were the cat getting my jaws pried open and having some odd bit of garbage thrown down my gullet i'd bite me real good real hard straight to the bone.

i'm thinking i forgot beth's birthday over the weekend. mom reminded me last night. i'm an idiot. and i realy love beth and i'm so out of touch with her. i'm a dummy and a poop. and here i am typing in lower case also right after mom told me she had a hard time following this without those helpful caps. and she criticized my punctuation too can you imagine that. i'm a hard case and my feet are singing to that yellow line a soft summer love song lonely feet thumping lovely earth down there

i'm thinking that sunset puts all kind of crazy notions into a guy's head...like maybe the world"s not such a bad place after all ("the right place for love," says mr. frost. "i don't know where it's likely to go better.") and have you ever tried to read that first section of faulkner's "the sound and the fury"? i'm on my second go-round and it's tougher this time. i mean tough tough real tough with all this shifting time and whatthehell pronouns and whothehell characters. mind of an idiot. i read it first a few years ago almost on a dare from prw. o but i was younger then and my feet could fly across the page like my eyes could roll around the track without breaking a sweat - hardly.

and today was my first day with nine 7th and 8th graders all together in the computer lab trying to type and cut and paste our way toward some reason for being there. writing writing and running one foot ahead of the other saying this ain't so bad this could be worse. at least nobody's throwing up...nobody's dropping dead. and that's no small thing. no matter where you are.

If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the word describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life. . . . The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.

W. H. Auden