chase scenes serial #18

a given day, like the spell in college during a large project push when I would stare at the X-acto knife blades that were wrapped and packaged in foil like sticks of gum and pictured taking them out and chewing on them. Even when they weren’t in sight I pictured them in this way. It made my teeth numb. “Ha une camera?” means “Do you have a room?”‡ For some time on this flight, or at least during the ascent, I believed I might not write any more on the trip, as it was my thought to only write while out of my home environment, the safe world where I compose empty, detached texts. I wanted this writing to be a vehicle of flux and whim. I almost just wrote “I wanted this writing to be about…” I caught myself. It is easy to slip into such lazy traps, especially when I now, having skirted that phrase, take note of the fact that this text is necessarily not ‘about’ anything, it exists somewhere, it seeks to be within a certain sphere of origin, that being the underlay narrative of my trip to North Dakota. But I almost stopped the composition because of my concern about flying. We are bouncing about again here at thirtythree thousand feet (33,000′). The wings waver like a diving board. I listen to ‘Trans-Europe Express.’ There is a patchwork cloud cover allowing me to make out the scale and
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