hermetic

Do you ever have one of those days where you just don't feel like leaving your house? Yeah me too except probably more than you. I am not trying to pit us into some sort of contest here, Viewer, just stating something resembling fact. Resembling. Do you remember the end of that famous Pynchon story, "Entropy," where Aubade punches out the window to create a thermo-equilibrium between the world of the outside to the world of the suffocating apartment? I don't want that today. And I don't think my landlord wants me to break any windows, either. But we have this digital thermometer on the window sill above our kitchen sink, wedged between the three tiny cacti from Ikea and a bronzed, weighty grasshopper. The thermometer (I stole it from the stockroom in the lab I used to work at, it was the least I could do for them) reads both inside and outside temperatures: there is a wired sensor that weaves under the heavy window and through the screen to the air. This morning, when I went in to fill my coffee cup for the third or fourth go, I noticed that, for only the second time (the first time maintains a memory only in its significance that it happened, the moment beyond that has not left any additional impression), the temperatures were the exact same: 70.6 F. I walked back to get my camera, sensing immortalization-in-blipdom (this reminds me of the nomenclature of the occasional British village: Millershire-upon-Ridgely, or something like that--I love that; why aren't there more American towns like that, we certainly have the rivers and streams and meandering tributaries to back up such a choice; I mean, most of our major cities, as they are every where else in the world, are built around such waterly thoroughfares, well, practically on them like enormous versions of F.L. Wright's Fallingwater or something), but when I returned (a total trip of maybe eight seconds; maybe) the outside temperature was already rising, I could see the tenth-decimal clicking higher, 70.8, 71.1 (Oh, and I fucking hated the way the two ones looked side-by-side with this reading--even the period did little to ease the closeness, because, unlike here where the number one has the little seriffed flag at the top, blowing to the left, and the perpendicular hash at the bottom, digital representations of the numeral are these jarringly straight sticks made up of two half-sticks; thankfully it nudged a notch--notchdnudged?--to 71.2 soon thereafter). With that opportunity squandered to timepassage, I did what any other vain homebody (is that bi-word phrase redundant? more on that some other time, perhaps) would do: set up the tripod to delve into the hazy realm of subpar self-portraiture. Of course the results are sub-standard, I am avoiding, purposely, the use of the sun. Most likely, it will be here tomorrow.


["Maybe she thought you were acting like a cold, dehumanized amoral scientist type."

"My God," Saul flung up an arm. "Dehumanized. How much more human can I get?" ]