it’s a hundred degrees out. tomorrow it’s supposed to get cooler according to this tall woman with tasteful glasses. this black woman is huge.
my friend wasn’t who i thought he was. he was someone else. he changed.
i don’t think anyone changes. he was changing when i met him. i thought he was the person he was before the change. i’m not sure i knew who that person was either. i have felt changes in myself but i’m not sure that i was another person after them.
i saw him here, not elsewhere. he said that he was looking to understand disease. disease is always there and it is not easy to see, he said. it looks like its surroundings but it is different. it goes through stages. i didn’t understand his obsession. he had never talked about disease and now he was talking about it at length. i had a hard time following his thinking. he said he had nothing to show for his life and that it meant that he was insane. where do they remember, he said. where do they go? they go to museums, schools, libraries, and family members. i think i raped a woman. everyone makes mistakes. we have to learn from our mistakes and not do them again. if we do it again we have to be looked after.  i have been reading and i can’t tell myself what i read but i know that i read it because i understood what i read. when you read, do you tell yourself what you read? do you have someone to talk to about it? i did when i was in school. i have been asking people what i said and they can’t tell me what i said. they refuse to tell me. can’t you tell by how i respond they say. i didn’t mean to kill her, i say. i made a mistake. it was a mistake. everyone makes mistakes. they laugh. are you drinking again they say. you know you shouldn’t drink. it gives you high blood pressure. your heart is going to explode. i had to do it i say. i cant help it. i’m sick. plato thought
criminals were sick. i agree with him. all criminals should be in a state hospital. everyone is sick. the entire state is a disease. there is lead in the water and the air.
do you want to know when i killed her? it was a day when the day changes. you have to be careful. the mist is there in the morning and at twilight. the irish used to be in the part of town where the chinese now reside. some of the chinese don’t like the russians and some of the russians don’t like the chinese. mostly they like each other. the irish are still where they always have been. the dutch are invisible. they are at the consulate or at the masonic temple. i haven’t been thinking about them like i have been about the chinese. they are as assimilated as the chinese. the pacific ocean leads to the golf course and the golden gate park. i don’t have a country to hate. my mother hated where she was born. she moved to the states to get away. she asked her father for his blessing. when she was in one of her moods she blasted her country. she called it names. it was a country that was jealous of her and wanted to suffocate her. it was boring, stuffy, and nothing happened for anyone who was different. she thought she was different but not too different. she thought i was different like the american she married. she refused to talk in our language for him. we talked about him in our language.  we continued to talk about him in english. it didn’t matter what language we talked in. we weren’t going to stop making fun of him when we felt like it. we were insolent and somehow resented that we were in a foreign country because of him.