From 3/6/11

Container cargo paused on the B&M rail tracks, broadcasting the odor of decayed fish before it shipped to the feed processing plants. Often, even in mid-summer, the cars would stop for hours, sending the odor through every city street. The promenades were the only neighborhoods excepted, the elderly and the already mortally ill wheeled along the sidewalks on the western promenade by the hospital, within sight of the nuanced pallor of the White Mountains as they towered very faintly over tenements and motels. From this vantage, you could see a gloom lift from the airport landing-strip, or a passenger jet rise or land with a thunder you’d almost think could vibrate the roots of the oaks or the granite foundations of the mansions built to overlook the west and the setting sun.

The more intensely you appreciate the cold and precise starlight of winter, the crueler your attitudes towards your fellow men, towards their infirmity and their imperfections. Their lack of aspirations lies at your feet. And the social and political spheres become smaller, more distant globes in the entire cosmogony your unfailing attention dwells upon, heedless of the excessive kinks and pockmarks of the surfaces, the devil being in the details that seem to obstruct the sublime, which is all coldness and symmetry as you gaze at them in a field. And as you drop your eyes to the field, the galactic sprays of wildflowers appear to repeat the constellations—until you step on a bedewed pad of cow-flop, a smell you can barely scrape from your shoes when you enter the safety of your clean and square house.

Because I dressed in rags, no female would regard me. I habitually disrespected the elderly, fretting every time I was in a grocery line when one of them was before me, counting change so carefully from her purse as I rolled my eyes. Whenever in offices, I moved to make way for others only begrudglingly, making it appear as if I were going out of my way for them, when in fact doing so would only be common courtesy. I chainsmoked without regard to those around me, in theaters, buses, and bars.