...the green fuse...

I go for a run in the near-rain wearing a pair of tight black short-pants with reflective stripes on the legs and an old green hooded sweatshirt. I have this idea that I will look really young and fit in this getup, but when I check the mirror I am actually a little ridiculous. I push myself to run up all the hills, looking only at the road directly in front of me. If I look up the whole hill I won’t make it. I listen to "The Dark Side of the Moon", which conjures the apocalyptic emotionalism of adolescence, especially when paired with the balls-out energy of running. I am probably breathing embarrassingly loudly, but I can’t hear it because I’m sprinting like a demon along with the music that fits my life perfectly for these 20 minutes or so: “And you run, you run/ to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking,/ racing around to come up behind you again./ The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older—/ shorter of breath and one day closer to death.” Can you imagine living in a time before those lyrics existed? For a moment I feel that everything depends on those lines, that the whole thing would just collapse if you took them away. I think about the necessity of music, even though I don’t always want it playing. Sometimes, there’s too much piping, spooling, zigzagging noise in my brain to handle adding some kind of melody in with it. It is possible that at times like those, a melody and the mathematical coherence of music would actually calm the noise. It might give the noise something to wrap itself around, some kind of structure. I am thinking of frames for topiary. And then, obviously, I’m thinking of “The Shining”. I decide that I will run all the way back up to the top of the neighbourhood, so that the first and the last hills will be the same. Can I make it? “Money” plays and I feel disgusted, enraged, strong. Then distanced from it. I have to stop near the beginning of the hill to stretch. There’s some stiffness in the torso. Also in the hips. Does this mean something? I run up and up and up slowly, steadily. At the top everything is supercharged meta-vibrato and the near-rain turns into proper rain. I am basically in a cloud, so I stick my MP3 player in the pocket of my hoodie. There seems to be a theme lately of “moisture and electronics don’t mix”. Discuss. The road is slick and black and seamed with bright green moss. Asphalt fissures. I like this neighbourhood because it is a little bit feral. The flora go wild here. The colours keep me alive. I need the rampant, confetti bushes; the muscular aloes; the fat grey sky. I yank the earphones out of my ears and then there is the rushing static of water on water and the maniac snarl of a chainsaw. There is a massive truck loaded with beautiful, enormous logs. The wood is a thousand luminous shades of brown. I walk down past it, toward my house, and see that some men are trying to repair this beast of a machine, groaning with timber. They are messing around in the front by the engine. They've got it all taken apart. I am impressed that somebody actually knows how to fix a truck like that, in this rain.