Somerville

Darla and Elena and I stayed up late tonight. Most of the conversation was a rehashing of our summertime talks about philosophy, touching on the anti-postmodern argument, dissing the multivalent theories of truth, reaffirming the “Deep Background” of external reality and sense-making, the value of living insofar as it is possible in the “desert of the real,” despite the various failures of knowing and the ultimate meaninglessness of any edifice built to support a life. I praised Elena's steadiness, her mostly un-idealized approach to living in the world: work, school, friends, consistent romance, pets, steadiness. We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. The cat at the screened-in window paced the sill and mewed insistently, conveying its impotent feline irritation at our incomprehension of its demands.

Finally, after talking for several hours in the close dark of the patio, we took a walk in the street. The night was pure velvet, warm, with layers of moving air passing through the branches and up the asphalt. I walked into the night barefoot, carrying my laptop as a portable boombox, chasing and being followed by one of Elena's escaped cats. We listened to sentimental music, hoping to experience the always-unexpected profoundity of emergent nostalgia, the thrill of specific iterations of beauty, that rising of directionless happiness, washed by submerged waves of deep feeling. Following along with the music, Darla and I occasionally lapsed into meandering accompanying harmonies. I stepped on a slug and screamed in an undignified manner. Passing the houses, we looked at and talked about the grainy dull of orange mercury lights and black dapples from summertime-heavy trees.

At the end of our walk, we stopped in the street and played an ad hoc game in which we picked up broken crabapples with our toes and tried to fling them down the street. It was fun, and we weren't even drunk.