Weak coffee at night and strong in the morning. If bars would pour over a few darker roasted beans, I would be a full-on teetotaler. The same drink that wakes me up stimulates active sleep. Probably a sign that I might consider becoming whatever the equivalent of a teetotaler is for coffee.
I did drink a little coffee last night and it is now morning. It’s May. It’s damp in Wisconsin. Yesterday it rained. The air quality is somewhere between mediocre and bad. Is this plot or an almanac? What’s the difference?
I think something between a map, a clock, and a dictionary would form most of the plot. This car from 1997 is defined as workable but not preferable (not preferable to have at all). It’s parked semi-permanently in my driveway. When I look outside at 7:10am, the car is there, looking damp. These three tools could help me remember to have plot. I went somewhere at a time, and it was definitional. But I’m resistant to reducing my life to triangulation. There must be other factors. But beauty and awe seem to happen in moments at places and with descriptions. So does satisfaction. And is the point of writing this book to place myself in a space-time-description that might be comprehensible? Ah, see, now I can relax. Because that is certainly not the point, for I believe I would be failing to make such a placement happen. Vagueness is the name of the year, obscurity the place. What year is this? Where am I? I refuse to answer with numbers or proper nouns. At least sometimes.
To categorize and be categorized, such is a plot. I’ve schemed to become legibly categorized for years, attempted to move mountains with bulldozers and shovels to make the mountains into a building, well-crafted and in the style of the times. But I am not a mason. To be “am” anything is something I’ve long resisted, even when I was pushing dirt around and driving that bulldozer. It seems antithetical to humanness, to be able to take the measure of oneself and others. Plants can’t measure themselves and don’t seem to care how tall they are. We can measure ourselves and don’t need to care about any of the metrics we can measure. Even if measuring helps us share our hypothesis testing, we don’t need to invest our life savings into said measurements, even after we’ve confirmed the spooky actions of gravity at a distance.
Categories are just math by a name. A variable stands in for a number, a word for a letter. And to be mathematized, such is the American dream. Forty acres. Four children (maybe it’s two now). Four bedrooms. Three bathrooms. Two people. One name. American number theory has guided my life for a long time. Compound annual salary growth rates, grade point averages, coordinates, connection counts. Discounted cash flows, valuations, number of minutes to respond. Numbers have always been kryptonite to super-calm. Quieter than a windless lake, slower than a stationary boulder, more restful than a sleeping panda; the powers are drained away when numbers are poured into the water supply.
Even now, in a number-limited time, there is a date, the time, a number of messages, a number of screens out of the total number of screens, a numbered web address, a line height, a publication date, and so many things I could count all staring at me. I wish to leave the number-world behind, to let the numbers pass through, to transcend American number theory (perhaps an acronym would help: we all become ANTs in this system, mindlessly lifting food items that are many times our body weights and bringing them back to the colony).
If the numbers are defeated the seriousness dragon is knocking on the door. This dragon is collecting signatures for a very important ballot proposal that any responsible citizen would support. I’m not going to the door, the dragon can knock itself out.
Roman Ryan 