May 23, 2010 Sunday

A leader who can funnel the indignation of the crowd and give that indignation a single voice, a name, who can claim to take the country back but exactly what is this country for which the leader makes a claim.
A leader who waffles haplessly in the effort to appear judicious and balanced may lose the election but at least is not shown the hangman’s noose.

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These exercises are as dry as dust he admitted in the private notebook he kept for himself and which was at this very date his only outlet for both personal doubt and reflection. He found himself lapidary at times, running on about topics that couldn’t possibly interest others, such as how to capture the lint accumulated in the dryer’s basket, instructions that read as follows: after removing the basket, cover your hand with a woolen sock and run it down the chute to capture as much lint as possible, then from the basket itself, pick a corner of the layer of lint and begin to roll it into a clump that you continue to rub across the screen, picking up more lint because, after all, since like attracts like, likewise lint attracts lint. Not discard the lint ball and throw the sock into the hamper, and hope that lint has not accumulated in the exhaust pipe. And if you can, as the sun lifts the leaves and pulls the masses into the roads and footpaths, drawing them into festivals and dirt track races, his thought took subterranean courses, among the collisions of stone, quartz and shale, his personal theaters were beer-cellars, and when the animals left their burrows to gambol through the forest, he replaced them. His favorite breakfasts had the texture of leaves and stems, for dinner he’d take the legume over the lettuce-leaf, for him the tuber of the carrot o the convolutions of the brassicae over the fruit or flower, like Leopold Bloom, the pork kidney over the flank steak, the tongue but not the pig’s knuckle, the gizzard not the hot wing, and among drugs, the depressant and pain-killer over the stimulant and psychotropic agent; for vacations, spelunking over swimming Caribbean beaches, no matter how many kept women or gorgeous gangster’s molls lay topless on the sand as menus read but not tasted. By dawn he failed to feel the leaden weights of sleep fall upon his eyes, sweating in his cocoon of bedclothes, the brands mixed, Martha Stewart with thrift store chic or go-to-hell practicality. His propensity was for Plutonian depths in which clear and separate entities could not be distinguished, worlds in which flickering shapes penetrated, mingled with others: had he been banished to the sky, he would hope to inhabit a raincloud sailing over the Andes or the least inhabited of the Himalayas, not (please!) over deserts or the thirsty gardens outside Los Angeles. The shovel he drove into the stony soil was nearly shattered, as if the stones had been spontaneously generated by the clay that had once been Adam, meaning from the clay. Against the shade and marble veins quarried only hillsides away shattered the pick of his mattock.