All these days, foreign coins or found keys rattling on their way to the bottom of a large mason jar shaped like me.

. . .

On a shelf somewhere in the cathedral of my memory, there are labeled snowglobes set with the places known in brief passage. Towns and kitchens and warehouses. Don't shake these snowglobes, for the objects aren't glued down; they will ajumble at the merest tap.

. . .

Sometimes you deceive yourself into thinking you can tell a lot about people just by painting their houses. We painted the walls and cabinets of a kitchen in the City while a bong gurgled incessantly in the living room as the lesbian art-student couple watched t.v. and their mournful bassett hound got lime-colored paint all over her tail.

You see that keychain, the one with the Hebrew script all over it? It bears twelve stones of different colors laid out in a grid of three across, four down. Those are the twelve foundation stones of the twelve tribes of Israel.

. . .

In a warehouse in West Oakland, I am bored. As usual, everyone is looking at each other and I am looking at everyone as well. No one is looking at the art because most of it looks like diary entries, explosions of pretty doodles and non sequiturs sprayed or glued unto walls. Some vaguely political and subsequently static pieces. Oh, and a huge pink cloth larvae grinning gold teeth hung in the centre. Jeez louise.

. . .

The streets of Byron have names like Forget Me Not and Camino Diablo. This is sleepiest town I have ever ridden through, with a documented population at under 1000, 75% white, and among the straw fauns on the mulberry-shaded porch of our friend's mother, we watched a tractor hiccup across a flat green field; back and forth it went, despite the soporiferous heat.

We stroked the velvety muzzles of yearlings, feet and hooves sinking in the haystrewn shitstinky earth, and we fanned ourselves in a heat so hot, water evaporated when it hit the shaded dust, and we sat in a pool, drinking Coronas and studying a great blonde field twittering with scrubjays, crows cawwing in the tall trees.

We were gonna drink a beer in a bar where a now-deceased hunter had hung up the heads of all the beautiful animals from around the world that he had ever slaughtered cuz he was a rich enough man with a rifle, but the levee had flooded the bridge so we had to turn around while great clouds of birds flew the Pacific Flyway as the sun flexed the last of its rays.

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