Ideas they sit in me for days, sometimes weeks or months before I finally sit down to write them out. For example I've been meaning to write about swimming, about going to the Purdue pool and jumping in the water that they keep a little cold, and how every time I jump in I'm reminded of all the times I've jumped into a pool of cold water and that feeling, that shocked and uncomfortable and unpleasant feeling that only lasts for a second, if that, and then once you start moving again through the water, once you start generating heat via your limbs and legs and rising to the surface, breathing from one side and glimpsing the pool side or lane line, the person swimming  next to you or the lifeguard walking back to her chair, and begin to think of lengths and laps and how far you've come and how far you have to go, and how it feels to stretch an arm out, to drag your fingers tips across the surface of the water, to breathe every other stroke from the same side or when my lungs are feeling strong, to breathe every three strokes, and how I decided to learn how to breathe from my left side after realizing that I had relatively little sensation on the right side of my body, and how I decided that I would make more efforts to redistribute my habits of movement, and how just recently I was looking at the bottom of my shoes and noticing that the worn out pattern on the sole was more evenly distributed then when I was younger, often off to one side or another, and I wondered if all that work in trying to balance out the movements in my body has had an actual effect in how I walk.

This evening I was reading an article by Anthony Easthope about history and rhetoric, a reading that makes me feel like everything I ever thought was wrong, and I am happy to get the chance but know that it will take me some time to consolidate what he is writing with my own beliefs. Though it's not like I totally understand what he is saying either. Last week I had time enough to go swimming three times. To take a hike up Burnett's Creek twice in a seven day span.This week I am sick again, the penalty for not taking care of myself when I began to recover from the worn-out / strung-out illness that I had two weeks ago. Not a penalty though, that would mean that there is somebody who is there to issue it. There is no one what will take care of us? Instead I will dose myself with cold medicine, read twenty pages of book four of the game of thrones and fall asleep. Because I am not smoking my sleep gets all screwed up. Because my sleep gets all screwed up I cannot rest. And so on, I take cold medicine. 

But when I get back into the pool, hopefully tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday, my lungs will be strong and I will breathe every three strokes instead of every two, and I will pull the water down the length of my body and climb horizontally through the resistance, and when I come to the end of my set, swimming my set of 6x200 with 5x100s of kicking in-between, or 4x300 with 4x100s of kicking in-between, when I wind down and warm down and let my arms turn through the water without resisting anything, letting the muscles drain of the stuff that makes them sore afterwards so I don't feel sore afterwards, sometimes I stop in the sun or kick on my back with my arms loosely dangling from my body and I get out of the pool and stretch and take a long hot shower, put my clothes on and get on my bike to ride back over the bridge to go feed my cats and start in on the night's work. All this and more which was not what I wanted to write about swimming. Instead I wanted to write a story. I wanted to write a story that circled around emptiness. But instead I wrote this.