Walking around Brooklyn as the evening arrives. It’s in the mid 30s (mid 90s if you’re native) and humid. The fire hydrants on the side streets have been let loose and with every sideways glance off the main road you see them, spurting out and misting the dusking day. Sometimes they spray alone and sometimes they have the company of children dancing through the water. Some are enthusiastic in their perpetual baptism of the sidewalk while others just slump a fat stream into the gutter. There’s that Saul Bellow line I once read quoted: “On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok”.

By 08:30 the sun is already strong and most of the hydrants have sobered up from the night before. The everyday has settled in again. On the sidewalks, in the sun, men are asleep, their bodies splayed out in organic shapes. Everything else is concrete and perpendicular.

Cross Brooklyn Bridge and you’re all of a sudden in Manhattan and start to feel like an inconvenience.

On the upper east side kids hum Mozart in pizza joints.

I drove for two hours today for purely immature reasons. Intercourse, PA is in the middle of Amish Dutch Country, thus named because the Americans confused “Deutsch”, the language of the Amish, with “Dutch” and then refused to subsequently correct themselves... A familiar story.

Now in Frederick MA I’m lying on a bed eight times my size. The room is vast but seedy. I feel like some kind of compromised monarch.

To get food that evening I had to run across a six lane highway to a gas station. Via touch screen I ordered a jumbo beef hotdog. It asked what toppings I wanted. I chose jalapeños, and chillies. It asked whether I wanted melted cheese. Yes, obviously. And what sauces? I chose chilli, mustard and ketchup. I couldn’t buy a beer because I’d left my driving license in the room.

After making it back to the bed via the same hectic route, the hot dog has turned to meat and mush, the bun all dissolved from the running and the sauces.

A commercial on the radio for the buffet at Hungry Mother National Park:

A frighteningly enthusiastic man names everything available to eat. The list of foodstuffs doesn’t stop after 15 seconds of rapid recitation and when it finally does our narrator adds (with full-pitch excitement) “and much, much, more!” The voice then begins to extol the virtues of the restaurant but finishes with the cautionary remark “But don’t take my word for it!” And just in case we were about to be so rash we are overwhelmed with a parade of other people’s words for it: heavily accented Southerners sincerely inform us of their devotion to the place, beginning with a confident woman who assures us with a poetic clarity: “It’s great!”

Interlude

“Most of everyone” = Everyone.

The Blue Ridge Mountains take their name from the shimmer of blue which blankets them, caused by light refracting through the isoprene that the trees emit. I also see a dead raccoon, intact except for its smeared head that pins it to the road, tongue out, eyes open, looking surprised to find itself in this arrangement, and dead.

Walking around the campus of Virginia Tech I couldn’t help thinking of the shooting that took place there. Everyone seems normal now.