So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit C:
“Are you alive in there”
– Addressed (without reply) as neither a statement nor a question by a cyclist to the interior of the bike’s closed trailer which housed a figure or an object topped by a hockey helmet. The cyclist had moments before stopped suddenly while hell bent for leather on the straightaway before the hill-descent near The Lake in Prospect Park. Later, the cyclist and the contraption that was clearly marked BURLEY lapped me at similar light speed as I was running near the Third Street exit. I never did see what was inside.
American investors, it seems, have discovered Canada, far and away the United States’ most important source of imported oil http://bit.ly/1ATPpz, not to mention the potential of its tar sands; in twenty-four years the International Energy Agency says tar sands demand may reach 110 million barrels per day, about 20 percent more than in 2009, and now with speculator talk of $200 per barrel for later this year, with zero connection to the geopolitical threat or production capabilities, or inventory, analyst reports, if they were to be printed from hard drives, would stretch from here to the moon and back, a super-hot market a derivatives goldmine, trading vehicles carved and sliced and diced, trades moving at light speed around the clock, and there is Canada, so solemn and certain and right, their bankers regulated in such a way that its home market will serve depositors, well at least a nod toward them, a headline free zone, bonuses paid to their traders so minuscule, Nixonian, when FIRE – Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – was just one of many growth centers in the economy, and Canada, rich in other natural resources too: steel, potash, grain, and corruption, sure, but ha! a joke by global standards; forget client state-ing the Mideast, not Israel, its nukes and Netanyahu, heaven forbid, but the Arab states, thanks to the entertainment industry, Facebook and Zynga and Twitter the world instead, “friend” Canada, fill the headline free zone with greenbacks, a “Ben Bernanke,” say, $100,000 denomination, bonds to China and equities in Canada. Tap those tar sands, and balance the budget, save Social Security, because uprisings won’t happen up north, there will be no scarf-hidden First Nation rebels sabotaging pipelines, didn’t work for Louis Riel http://bit.ly/9sd2Si and it won’t work now. Canada, home of The POGG – Peace, Order and Good Government – won’t push back against American investors. Get in there while the getting’s good.
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Oscar Night (Feb. 27) .¤.¤. “It’s Oscar Night, or as it’s called in my family, (pause) Passover.” The only legitimate out-loud laugh line in the whole damn show is courtesy of Bob Hope, dragged from the archives, the first nationally televised Academy Awards in 1953. Anne Hathaway and James Franco?! Frankly, I’d like a robot to do it next year, programmed to tell Bob Hope-style jokes.
Robots, of course, are in, as a casual reading of today’s magazines will tell you, ie, an excerpt from Monday’s handiwork in the New York Post’s Media City column: “With all the coverage lately about the IBM computer Watson’s win over humans on “Jeopardy,” it was comforting to read the profile about Professor Daryl Bem and his case for ESP. Funny. Maybe humans are looking better than machines because we’re still the ones writing the articles . . .”
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Today (Tuesday), London Plane tree day, brilliant winter sky, and now it is March, and the only snow cover looks like burial mounds for heretical Yetis, where does all the dirt come from? The air, vehicle exhaust, bird and mammal excretions, has it always been this way? I’m thinking Jenny Diski in “Skating to Antarctica:” “I wanted white and ice as far as the eye could see . . . I wanted my white bedroom extended beyond reason.”
On a mental horizon only spirits break. My body, though, is holding up, thank God. Only a shadow of pain, a hint, how much is body memory, how much is real? Fifty minutes today and a brisk pace in the splendid blue, the Park road finally clear so that I can do my staircase, the intervals that I’ll need in order to keep a passable pace in Boston, taking inventory as I go, and yes a bit of fore-foot pain (Pain in the Four Foot, sounding like Don Chevrier and Don Duguid, Silver Broom coverage,) the left foot, I’m thinking, it’s time to toss these running shoes, surely they have more than four hundred miles on them, that the wear is contributing to the pain. Time magazine double issue http://ti.me/ftIJXg this week is on pain, and a story in The New Yorker by the great David Foster Wallace, and I quote, “Patients who are critically ill or gravely injured do not necessarily experience intense pain . . . In addition, the personality of a neurotic patient may accentuate felt pain, and a stoic or resilient personality may diminish its perceived intensity.” Now, though, what to read next .¤.¤. Now, it’s the wonders of David Mitchell and his debut novel, “Ghostwritten,” and next, “The Interrogative Mood,” by Padgett Powell, who, in the mid-1980s, stood with M before the local sinkhole in Gainesville, Fla., when she was being courted for a writing professor’s job, but M’s destiny was elsewhere and she did not stay in Gainesville, but Powell did, to his immense credit has written a novel respectfully reviewed in a recent essay in the London Review of Books, (Feb. 3, “Dude, C’est Moi”), which is one question after another after another: “Would it be reasonable to ask someone if he or she has a favorite musical note?’ ‘Do you appreciate that an oyster has, among its other organs, a heart?’ A book, I think, the late David Foster Wallace would admire.
Next: Running for Your Life: Cage Diem
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