chase scenes serial #5
to turn on the air conditioner under the window and check out for the night. Who knows where I shall start again tomorrow, perhaps where I land, or perhaps I shall return to Bismarck, that is the beauty of such a French process, no? No, I just got out of the pool again. I tried to think about that other indoor pool but I guess you can only do it once, then if you write about it that pretty much kills it.‡ I did think, on the long walk today, about what I should write when I got back tonight. All I could think about was laying bare this process, and saying, no, writing things like “you see?” It always began to take on this didactic turn in my thoughts, addressing the readerly ‘you,’ but not in an inclusive way. Perhaps I cannot write inclusively, or ‘for’ anyone. When I did it last summer in South Dakota it sounds like ‘What did you do this summer?’ Like my travelogue to the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, complete with my autograph, no, not my autograph, complete with the autograph of the manager of the Travelodge in Slidell. They did not have a pool there. I remember that being tremendously upsetting for my sister and myself. I don’t think the Travelodge chain has ever really resecured, or recovered, rather, from that letdown in my eyes. If I were to see a Travelodge next to a Motel 6 or Knight’s Inn I would
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