on tagging

Tagged by surya. that i'm sure of. not only the spartan color scheme and minimal brush strokes but where he chose to leave his mark. I am thinking about what motivated him. i read that the smell of urine in men's bathrooms promotes aggressive behavior, but i don't think urinating on the floor is surya's forte; that is sure. i said something to the waitress, just a general remark hoping to disimulate my guilt or perceived guilt for complicity through silence, but surely it had the opposite effect. by now everyone was looking at us. i want to make it clear that normally i don't enjoy restaurant style food since the flavors are so rich and returning from the restaurant becomes quite a chore, so i started making the motions of someone who has been incapacitated by a good meal, arching my back, rubbing my belly, cracking my knuckles then slouching dramatically. just then it occurred to me that the general remark i had made to the waitress could only be belied by my gestures. i must have referred to something like dancing or jogging (though i can't now recall exactly what). just as i was contemplating whether or not a third action could somehow smooth out the tenuous transition from the remark and the gesticulations, surya returned, saying 'I wish it hadn't been so late in the day when we came here, because now we must go. ipso facto.' in the parking lot a young couple approached us, apparently relations of surya since he engaged them in a lively albeit rushed conversation where my head was floating so all the better that i wasn't able to get a word in. we all exchanged contact information since clearly there was too much to talk about to be standing in a parking lot. i misspelled my email address intentionally. a mile down the road i pulled over to let my heart slow down, to collect myself really. the situation in the restaurant had exhausted my fresh nerves, now starting to fray. surya confessed that he'd have offered to drive but was facing the same challenges as me. we smoked three cigarettes each and listened to higher love four times and i started the car again. several times on the drive back i was about to start a speech of disapproval but now i'm glad i didn't since i know now he went back to right the situation the next morning without anyone knowing there was ever a problem. i hear that nowadays (only one year later!) you could never pull off a stunt like that and walk away free. each year people come to resemble gazelles more and more. if there is any chance of trouble they bolt and run until they crash into something. every year they have to put up more barricades on the highways to assure us that if and when we bolt we know exactly where we'll crash. at least a year ago you had time to fix things up before trouble became serious; now any trouble is considered serious. in fact no trouble at all is considered serious and everyone sits seriously, waiting to bolt. the reason i'm bringing all of this up is that this morning I wondered how much things truly had changed. i regret not bringing a camera so you could see what i saw. it was dramatic because usually i am talking with the voice of someone who suspects that people are changing in to gazelles, thinking they are all under my thumb or my glare. not only was surya's name still there, but someone else had scratched into the steel below it in a flowing script blows. though i say i didn't have a camera, i do have a good memory, and i have stolen a calligraphy set from the korean restaurant where i sing on wednesday nights to make the best possible reproduction.

did I cry? no. I am not always in control of my emotions, but this time i handled everything with a cool detachment normally reserved for my backgammon matches. besides, nothing soothed me more at that moment than seeing
, knowing that things weren't as i feared they were; crying was my last possible reaction. i write in the year 2007, about a week after the incident at el arroyo with the gentleman who only consumed milk and margaritas. i need to make reference to unrelated events, since for me, time passes not from one day to the next but from one event to the next. although time flows slowly when you make careful scrutiny of nearby events, it nearly stagnates when you think only of grand and infrequent events. at any rate when people who haven't seen me for long ask me how quickly the time passed, i respond that each day of it lasted twenty four hours, each hour corresponding to the time elapsed between a given number of transitions between two hyperfine states of a particular isotope of cesium. I should try to contact surya again. truly nothing prevents me from doing so, despite what people probably believe. i would tell him that i finished his unfinished ars magna for him. I tag...