08.06.04 - 6:16 p.m.

I have trouble with dates. I type the date so many times in a day, and I move at some ridiculously rapid pace, AND we have to document everything so thoroughly, that I often find my mind moving on autopilot, fingers dancing randomly ahead. My hands know I need to type a date here, so often as not they type some random month. The random months I inflict on my correspondence have neither rhyme nor reason. I'm as likely to type December in August as I am July or March. Well, hmm. Actually: I don't often mistakenly type March, now that I think about it. It's usually a month-ish month, rather than one of those feeble imitations of a month. Something solid and round, something with a certain gravid heft, the sort of month that could sit behind a bit mahogany desk and look down on all the little worker-bee months that do nothing more than prepare the world for its return, a narcissistic month.

September. December. Sometimes January. November, or February.

Compared to these months, the rest of the months aren't much, are they? They're flimsy, they don't hold together, they lack authority. There's no -ember, there's no -uary to give them the gravitas they need to be taken seriously. I suppose it's no surprise that the heavy months are also the heavy times of the year, when we need man-made time to move regularly, to keep its pace, when it has to be durable to hold up to all our losses and all the dangers of the turning dark seasons.

Summertime, we barely need the months to structure the days; they can glide together, some lazy, humid, organic thing, structureless, without --

-- oh, poo. I was on a roll when I started that conceit, but I had to get back to work. I'm trying to keep up with my billing these days, especially early in the month, so I know how much taking off later days in the month will affect my budget, and that broke the golden thread of - the golden thread of, holy crap, I cannot even think, anymore. It broke the golden thread of creation. I was falling into cliche pretty quickly there, and I despise clich�.

Now, I'm sitting here enjoying my hair (new shampoo!) and the day (70 degrees F, no humidity, sunlight for days. One of those devastatingly perfect mornings, the sort of blue sky that just breaks you open, like a cracked egg) and the cure, which I've tucked into the CD player of my computer. Greatest hits. Current song: "A Forest" from, what, Chinese Whispers? Something like that, one of the early albums, but not the first album. It has a good, hmm, it has a good repeating/changing motif, I like the underlying structure, which has a certain driving monotony, so it's lulling without being sleepy, with enough variation to keep it interesting. I think that the video for this song was just - superspeed images of a train going through the british countryside, and for that reason, I associate the music with the rhythm of a train, the lulling clack-clack.

Clack-clack-clack.

I wish they still had trains like they did in the 40s, sleek-nosed, curvacious trains clad in stainless steel or shiny red enamel, trains that look more like snakes than machines, and grand train stations with sweeping marble architecture and ticket agents behind wrought iron cages, exchanging tickets for money over a marble sill, polished and cool beneath your wrist. Your pulse against the marble, the bars of the cage topped with some elaborate representation of a grape vine, men in fedoras with winter coats tossed over their arms, women in suits with silk stockings - the seams perfectly straight down the pack of their legs - striding through the echoing vault of a station, their heels clack-clack-clattering on the marble floors like the rhythm of a running train, their reflections vague and wavery in the polished marble, some impressionistic outline of the human form, rendered in sweeps of reflected light on polished stone. I like the straight, moving trains best as connectors, opening outward from their hubs like the petals from an unfurled flower turning into deep suckers that burrow through the ground and rise again. I like the tracks better than interstates, anarchic interstates, go anywhere anytime, open up the whole word for the bri

[Whoa - I wrote that this morning. Now it's late in the evening, long day. I'm posting it without attempting to pick up the thread. Right now, I just want to get home.]