Pay Period

This sky is staggered today. I see geese. They form a line. The light is unlike any other time of year. My friend Jamie Bettaso is here from Arcata, California. We are spending time drinking Yard's beer and making pasta. It seems sometimes like the long silences spent are worth the taste of fresh mozzarella at midnight while watching Saturday Night Live. I am reading Milan Kundera's book, The Joke. I completely envelope his sentiment about forgetting. How can I explain it here? "If a man loses the paradise of the future, he still has the paradise of the past, paradise lost. From childhood I have been fascinated by the folk tradition called the Ride of the Kings: a singularly beautiful ceremony whose meaning has long been lost and which survives only as a string of obscure gestures. This rite frames the action of the novel; it is a frame of forgetting. Yesterday's action is obscured by today, and the strongest link binding us to a life constantly eaten away by forgetting is nostalgia. Remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism are the two pans of the scales that give the novel its equilibrium."