Hobgoblin

Weird. I've been back in Boston for six hours and my fingers smell like a paper clip, which was not something I was aware was possible -- indeed, if I'd been asked whether paper clips had a smell, I'd've said no. But they do. And it's transferable. And it makes me wonder about the essence of things, whether there is some glowing core of realness that makes a thing the thing in question. Ha ha, John Rubadeau, "things" is my leitmotif! It is not, in fact, bearded men, because they recede to the periphery, to East Lansing and Britton and Albion and Chelsea and Orange County and Jackson (I myself receded from Ann Arbor, slowly, piece by piece, like a hairline) -- but! it is periphery that makes shape. My periphery is the shape of me. Ahhh, rhyming.
Jake sometimes writes down things I say when I talk, which is both satisfying and discomfiting. I both like and dislike the sense of permanence it gives to chatter. Like it because it makes me feel important and as though my words are making a small blue-lined impact, red ink; dislike it because what is he doing with those words and sentences that my mind spun suddenly, once he's concretized them into scrappy little objects outside my ken and control? If it were me, writing, I'd save them up like a squirrel to use later or to make a Jake to talk with when he's not talking. I don't want to be caught in inconsistency or cowardice or failure.... YAAAAAY!