Most people want justice

But in absence of justice

They will take vengeance.

As if dying was peak existence.

We called it sweet

In the cherry season of history.

You Don’t Get to Decide How to Feel About Not Having Free Will

I heard more babies are born when there’s a full moon and “no one knows why.”

A few days later I heard it’s a myth.

I heard there are land tides—and this is true—the moon pulls the land up.

Simone de Beauvoir said, I cannot appropriate the snow field where I slide.

The fundamental ambiguity: How am I unlike the field, when I am like the field, to the field?

(Not like anything at all.)

I wonder if mothers are tidal—if there are tides in the womb.

Grave and gravity don’t share the same root.

Yesterday, I was gazing out the window and saw a squirrel try to jump from the roof of a house to a tree branch and miss.

For a second it scrambled for purchase in midair—it recognized its own death.

It looked so human, like a stuntman.

Was there time for fear, in squirrel time?

My husband and I have argued about the sky.

He says, There’s no clouds, with clouds in the background.

He says, There’s no trees. I say, I’m looking at a tree right now. (The squirrel’s gravesite.)

You can’t just talk about the weather anymore.

There’s an urge to tell someone what’s happening, but the people who care know, and the people who don’t know don’t care.

Good luck feels like bad luck waiting to happen, but bad luck still just feels like bad luck.

When good things happen I don’t know how to feel.

It’s not that I’m conflicted—more that I’m trying to use reason to determine how happy I should be.

At Kennedy Airport I had the experience of wanting to see a famous person and not care. That was a particular experience I wanted to have.

Instead, during that experience, the experience of wanting, I saw someone I know from my own past. Neither of us lives in New York.

Do our experiences belong to us? Are they a property, “like a hat”?

(Wittgenstein says no.)

Do you have to pay attention to your own desires, which you do not own, to be mindful?

Can you not pay attention to your desires?

Will attention excite or assuage my desire? (You can’t observe X without changing X.)

I don’t care. I want to change my mind.

The Quality of Nothing (After This Nothing Happened)

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” feels disingenuous, on an ontological level, because we think of even nothing as something.

I think of nothing as empty space in all directions. But emptiness, darkness, is something.