curious  curiouser an curiouser cried Alice

                                he was reading The Attention Merchants by Wu(he called him by his last name now because they were old friends  hed read his first book  The Master Switch  then it was Timothy Wu  why would a Wu Anglosaxonise his name – though Logan the understaffed assist manager of the car rental he did business with Do More With Less  Logan Nguyen Vietnamese  why would a Nguyen do in kind  to fit in  better to out fit)

                                                                                  and the while he was in his head  above him cawed and hawed a blackbird that sat atop of an electrical pole in the very back corner of his yard

when he first went outside onto the porch it met him with haw    haw    haw    like laughter forced at a bad joke  then caw  caw  caw then hawhaw  caw   hawhaw ha  seeming desperate to draw attention to itself

he relented  he looked up at it

it shaddup

then he returned his gaze to the paper and clipboard on the porch railing

Caw  Caw  Caw

an extraspecies game?Why not  he Haw  Haw  Hawed back at it  Lets try this Ill haw four times   Haw   Haw   Haw   Haw

damn if the bird didnt mimic him and haw back four timesCommunication  but what the fuck were they talking about

his cats indie and october were at the screen door plucking at its screenmewing DOWN  they took their paws down

two more attention getters  merchants

he was surrounded by them Me Me Me Me

                                    while all he ever sought was anonymity  privacy   which he had to upend to make a living

the blackbird must have slipped inside his head an disagreed

it went off on a series of Caw Caw Cawbetter than two or three dozen rapid chimes in a rowMe Me Me like a trained vocalist warming up their voice singing doing scalesthough monotone for a performance

What was her name

the question hed been wrestling withhis forgetfulness  he never forgot a girls nameever  he had to be deliberate let it come back into his mind

she had been there every daythree times a day when he crawled out of the hot Epsom salt baths he took to assuage his painful jointssplit stem to stern bilaterally atasudden it came onto him

youd think shed offer him a towel when he was on all floors on the bathmat

at least he was covered with a scent of lavender oil

when finally at work people often would tell him he smelled good

Thank you  Its lavender oil

their eyebrows arched nearly imperceptibly A dude Lavender oil

I use it in my bath water

eyebrows arched again Who takes baths

he crawled out of the bathtub

made it up to his feet

grabbed a bath towel off a hook with two handsdidnt grabdidnt use his hands  held it between his wrists  his hands didnt work very well

she wouldnt have been much help anyways 

she didnt have wrists

she had fine articulated legs

her web was so fine he couldnt even see it up in the corner above the vanity

she seemed suspended in midair  magickal

the only thing that spoiled her perfection were the wrapped insect husks behind and under her 

why couldnt he remember her name

she attended his baths for nearly a year 

three fucking hot baths a day

then she went missing one morning

he entered the bathroom saying Good morning up into her corneran immediately his heart fell immediately he missed her  what was her name

his pain was finally ebbing what was her name  an he felt she had something to do with thatno one could convince him otherwise  Do spiders live for yearshe didnt know  she didnt grow spontaneously to her immense sizethree inches toe-to-crossedopposite-leg-toe

he was nearing painlessness

an she was gone

what was her name

The Attention Merchants laid on the rail off to his right

he bookmarked it with a yellowed obit Also noted from the Minneapolis StarTribune  he dated it 11  6. 89   Albert Spaggiari, 57, mastermind of the spectacular “sewer gang” bank heist in Nice, France, and on the run for 12 years, died and his body was left outside his mother’s house in Hyeres, France, by friends on Saturday, police report. 

he liked the part that Alberts body was left in front of his mothers house so shed know

he wished he knew

              then there was a bluesparkling behind his eyes  rising up out of the deep black well of his memory an imagination  her name    her name floated up out of it in letters etched like whitefluffed snowflakes held together on fine silk tines  an artisan web she might have spun

appleseed

appleseed

did it have to be that hard

Hawhaw  caw   hawhaw ha  ha    HA

You shaddup

0123pm (breaking tradition this once),  Friday,  10  11. 17

1024,  Saturday – Veterans Day,  11  11. 17

Frank Turner  The Way I Tend To Be  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf5O2M5GaEA