Vignette City 40.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***

Things I have been wondering about since I lost my job and have therefore been spending a lot of time down in the riverfront park eating my Tupperware lunch out of my otherwise empty briefcase and then waiting to go home until rush hour so that Jules won’t catch on to the fact I got fired:

• What is the hiking like in Cuba? It has to be pretty good, I would imagine. I know they have mountains because that’s where Castro hid out. I wonder if there were ever days when the rebels were sneaking up cow paths and trails, hauling food and ammunition up to camp, and maybe one of them stopped along the trail and looked around and thought, “Holy hell, it is really fucking gorgeous out here.”

• If we could breed trees to produce wifi signals, that would really change a lot about the world.

• Jules has probably always known that she was too good for me.

• Are really beautiful movies written backwards? Based on a series of ideas for certain shots and then somebody just figures out how to make all of those shots connect via some kind of story? Or are there really people so good at thinking in shots that they can read a script and somehow cram some kind of beauty in between the lines? I don’t know much about movies, but that seems like it would be a really rewarding kind of life, having to just find ways to make life beautiful.

• Jules hasn’t been sleeping well lately, wrestling all around in bed at night. I have actually been sleeping better than normal.

• I’ve been reading a book called Railroads in Tasmania, about the railroads in Tasmania. I have not been reading it really, mostly I have been looking at the really luscious photographs. I have a hard time remembering that Tasmania is a real place. I have a hard time remembering that any distant place is real. Everyplace I have ever seen is pretty much just a place like this one.

• There must me something kind of erotic about being a woman and having your measurements taken. Unless women are just as sensitive about their bodies as I am about mine. But why would they be? When theirs are so pretty looking. Some of us just look like flubby middle-aged men. There is nothing erotic about us. Or me. Retired soccer players, maybe their measurement-taking is erotic. I don’t know much about soccer.

• Jules will notice next week when my paycheck doesn’t deposit.

• That bridge is really high. A really pretty bridge.

• Jules will ask me to ask HR what happened with my direct deposit and that will buy me another week.

• I wonder how high that bridge actually is? The roadway seems pretty high.

• Jules is my beneficiary.

• I wonder how much I’m worth.

• I wonder if the underthings women wear under their funerary dresses are more or less elaborate than what they wear under any other dresses? Do they have special underthings? I would like to think so, but I don’t know.

• How high does a bridge need to be, for it to be the terminal kind? I wonder if anyone has ever done the math on that. On how high a bridge can be before it becomes deadly? 

• How do jellyfish mate, I wonder?

• What is Jules doing right now?

• What should I do with my briefcase? Just leave it here against the guardrail? Will they send a boat? Is there a special boat that fishes people out of the river? How busy is that boat, I wonder? 

• I wonder if Jules will be happier this way.

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