“...foam is fleeting, momentary, plural, “not nothing”’—Peter Sloterdijk, Foams

“But that shouldn’t stop us from listening…this is the way we prepare for the lesson of echoes, imitation, conversations, duets, and other types of shared refrain.”—Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

“That’s where the bubbles come in. It’s pretty quiet in here right now but I know what you’re thinking. Like to take responsibility for those thoughts. [Opens can of Diet Coke with a loud pop.]”— Eileen Myles, “Foam”




        I took the wrong advice…

        A sentence was incompressible, which is a word that describes flows.

Squashed air, or arterial tissue. Its shape remains despite the temperature shift. It isn’t a thing that melts, or has
edges. Can it describe what’s going on in the sauna? Not just the heat but the sound,
the way a conversation moves in and out of states of matter. Because water is incompressible its weight
displaces what is in it. It moves around the more dense things and carries what is less dense.

Therefore the sentence orders things between. I am after the space between words, or the time. Humming. I
became a mouthpiece of the unspectacular.
A pseudoscience documentary about the memory of water suggests it is water’s movement that gives it capacity
to heal. Water that passes through pipes is forced into a negative shape. Conversely, thoughts and emotions
behind spoken words can alter water’s molecular structure. The crystallography is, according to those
interviewed, a blueprint for reality.
Dogs understand this and choose to drink from streams and other flowing sources.
In the tub I am waiting for something to happen, getting tired of things. Often, in the afternoons, there is
nothing else to do and it makes sense to sit on the lounge chair for hours. In places where work is about
showing up but not delivering. Impressions cannot be just gathered up and contextualized. She can’t make
examples of others who are talking.

The sauna—promises not to—disaggregate the subject in tones or hormone imbalances. A subject oscillates
between its inhabitation or its displacement—between she/I, the point is to condense—become cloud—
without fever—whose whisper. In the safety of baking and cooling as extremes—she is not a nuclear spent fuel
rod but she is in water, cooling—particles excite and then disaggregate.

These are spa states like the eucalyptus room in that hotel in Las Vegas—the fog—she could not even see her
hands. 
Or, while sharing a plate of french fries in Copenhagen, a revelation that it was the best water she’d ever tasted.
She drank three cups before going inside to inspect the water filter. It had multiple settings but mostly it was
the temperature and smoothness that startled. A tourism of the drinkability of water or its overuse in luxury
cases in the desert.
A thought expands in the plume. Does this sentence explain it? I forgive you.




7:35pm, Texas, late August

Another day at a public pool a woman starts a conversation with the guy she sat next to when she parted the innertube children with her foot.

She asks a question that seems obvious, whether he was visiting from elsewhere, and where that elsewhere was.

West Virginia, we’re on a road trip, living out of a FourRunner we outfitted with a half bed in the back.

He gestures at his girlfriend and her two braids.

And then the question is Are you an artist? No but my girlfriend… who is talking to a man wearing a cowboy hat, who turns with a straw in her mouth… I do dance, choreography, poetry and to pay the bills I blog for Medium.

He is a software engineer.

Things begin to reverberate in the pool and louden, the jets on high and the temperature evening out with the foam.

A woman is staring at the backside of the man wearing a cowboy hat.

She speaks to him; she’s surprised he’s still in town; she’d heard he’d been run out for pulling a gun on someone that was something between a water gun and a 9mm, no one knew for sure.

And that’s fine, everything is fine, the cowboy performs a gesture of how fine it is and everyone is laughing or not considering the rumor of the man with a gun and whether he pulled it on someone or was run out of town.

She was sitting with that and remembered him differently, standing around a fire pit one night, a different bar, where he’d talked about his dad who worked at the astronomical observatory. Something sad happened to him, but she couldn’t remember the details.

Another subject of rumors stands in the middle of the tub. He cups the foam as he describes the town as a Purgatory. He catches himself in the middle of his saying it, as if surprised and pleased with himself, as if no place has ever been described as such. As if purgatory is not the descriptor of many places in which waiting, a slow brew of uncertainty, becomes the word for being caught between two circuits, one of predictable repetition and the other of possible refrain.

He does not seem so interested in the weather as he is in describing his theories about it, except that no one knows what weather he is talking about, and those looks of bewilderment or boredom signal to him to slow down the speech even more, as if the whole tub is full of toddlers.

The kids look at each other before covering their ears and giggling, which the Software Engineer points out is so cute, the decision they’d made in that instant like, Should we do this? Okay!

Her idea of time or space is measured by how much fits in the constraint of a hot tub.

Events over multiple days blur into a single day, a single event due to the stasis of its staging, and the unvaried quality of things happening in it.

The specificities of bodies become entropic and rearrange themselves in neon, sag, cellulite, hairiness, equipment against the sun.

There is a technics to waiting; observing the weather to see what it will do.

A train goes by.

She nods or smiles, then trails off.


The rumor she heard was an actual event she verified later in an old newspaper—a disgruntled observatory worker shot out the telescope mirrors.

Frozen water crystals become altered with certain frequencies and this causes the woo people to go into austerity measures with the Berkey filters. In a place where zombie wells describe the radioactivity of produced water used in fracking operations that threaten an aquifer.

Recently, a pipe had leaked into the springs around which one rural economy persisted. Eventually, people stopped talking about it. The turtles had mostly disappeared but there were always one or two. And besides there was a group of gals who practiced mermaidism, swimming with real-looking tails.

In a bath, alone, yet in public, this sometimes surfaces as a feeling that I could drown. I prefer to touch down when I’m swimming. I am not incompressible and yet neither is this what I’m describing. I do not like going out on boats.

 

10am, Texas, late August 2024

Figures move through viscosities in excess of their form.

A breath is one kind of viscous gesture—a conversation is another.

So that the parameters of space or time, figure or form matter less, are multiple in their contingencies or modulation.

As if a person could be painted into a place, a variable, the strokes visible or thick and touching no gap and revealing no canvas.

The foam is relation without form—a physicality that shifts form—becomes part of another—moves with it—becomes a rhythm and refrain.

Not separable, then: unable to be itself without the other: bread and yeast; molecule and water; yellow and sunflower, dark and stars, human and air.

As the water bubbles and sprays and splashes the ledge of the tub, she wonders Is the heat separable from heat? Is hot tub water separable from bubbles? Is dust from air? Is social media from eating? Is a tone of voice or a gesture of tucking up wet hair? Is a red dress? Can air be distinguished from its airiness? Is foam the water or its wateriness?

Is the topic of sunflowers, and the water bill, that the mother states is much too high and yet she’s responsible to (she makes a space for the word babies, but avoids it) caring, and others in the tub seem supportive of that effort, they nod.

She tells a story of when A, as a three-year-old, was caught with 3/4 of a chocolate bunny in his mouth, and had to be dangled by the feet to prevent the “Tasmanian devil”. from running around his mother in circles.

V says her nickname as a kid was Thundercloud, for all the tantrums she threw.

She relates that as kids she and her brother often threw crying tantrums, from sensory difficulties—the difficulty of an itchy, wooly world.

V says she used to cry if her underwear gave her wedgies. The women in the pool reach consensus about this except for I, who muses about the ubiquity of thongs. She trails off…loses the thread of the conversation.

She wasn’t sure if V was being entirely real. It seemed to occasion a performative mode, where the both of them got caught up in vibes, being its adjudicators among less-lucid types, people more expert at the task of vibing or living in general.

L comments on the chlorine and insists on showering before and after to avoid pruning, to which V expresses an insincere shame that she only showers once a week.

At that moment she began to itch, sensitive to chlorine, and felt the effects of Modelo, supposing it could account for misreading a situation.

Sounds as refrains—returns to still or slow objects, pausing in moments—for listeners—its “fragile condition of regularities”—shifting along a continuum of attention.

The ends of sentences hang in mid-air.

The banalities of small talk take on the texture of foam, become an event of minor sociality, world-making statements exchanged for the skin of things heard and responded to.



Nothing happens — although something happens in the failures to settle into thought — to breathe its air — realizing the happening is imperceptible at the speed you have been thinking it.




6pm, Oslo, late December 2025


She was meeting a friend. Or an acquaintance, someone she knew and would urge toward deeper intimacy based on surface-level facts she knew about her. She was early; and awkward, a foreigner. So marched around in bare feet on the snowy deck looking for a hut where there would be few people to see her.

In the sauna a subject emerges from listening. And considers interference as a concept for holding ambivalent modes.

It took time to get there. The middle became temperature shifts, diurnality, whether there was ice on the surface of the water, who was calibrating the steam.

Turbulence underscores the event.

A mathematical equation to describe vortices and flows in perfect ratios was thought to be “unsolvable,” or so goes the lore.

There is no way to predict where and how thousands of rubber duckies—fallen off a cargo boat in the ocean—will end up. The chaos of wind. Or the approximate location for drilling a well.

And sweat beading up irrationally.

In Oslo it’s cruise ships and fake viking vessels alongside yachts you can see from the shore where the saunas are.

In a daydream I imagine its cargo unspools—how thousands of rubber duckies—come to disturb the petrostate as a provider of an easy life.


Noon, Oslo, late December 2025


She is not the figure crafting stability in a narrative about change—it’s the heat. The figure—her—is a variable shifting in thermal registers.

Like an image in infrared its zones become resonant and blur the edges of a body so that what is called event is more of a shift in tone, a drop in temperature.

A foam is not form so much as elastic across hands, towel, little stove, smell of wood. Just sitting there, looking off at the water, making small talk but without the purpose of emotional transaction. How at some point the conversation must be forced…

To admit that breathing is hard here.

That’s when it became hard to listen to what was untranslatable (a place? a form of motion? a gesture?)

The lie is sustained over ages.

It became hard to distinguish what was happening (in the heat) from what was not—but what could be happening (also heat).

It was okay, it was okay. She had to keep up the conversation somehow. In air, or else risk dissociating. Then someone always asks anyway Are you okay?

And some pragmatic gesture to going out to the water, where always, at first, it seemed she could just jump in, but then, upon landing her toes on the rung, became the ambition of both the mountaineer and people that liked to go with the flow, which was not like her. And so she retracted her foot, or dipped it again more incrementally. A preference for a slower acclimation (that did not protect her from shock), somehow predictable and unforced, like the steady speed of the orbit around the sun.



6:05pm, Texas, late August 2024


She attends to the time of day, temperature shifts, crowd density. It is unclear which variable matters—or what the experiment is. To show fractured attention? As what listening is—misreading—tuning in and out—depleting oxygen as a tool of speaking.

It was hard to be convinced of anything and that’s what she was seeking, something she could not look away from, but not in how it coerced her into being there rather—how it pulled her out of herself.

The hot tub obviates flesh and water and being in the world—the way sound is a way of being in the world, the way the elemental enfolds bodies into it.

She moves a layer of foam from one instance of the overpowerful bubbling of a jet, revealing movement in advance of its accumulation.

The wave touches her, hot tub foam in the shape of cupcake frosting, though she admits it could look like many other things, that it was not limited to cupcakes or even anything at all: an idea ought to reflect its possibility — and not submit to calls to clarity.

That said, the full jets churn the foam and make the disparate bodies (who sink to the underwater bench and prop themselves above it periodically, to avoid overheating) appear dynamic in their stasis.

And—now that the bartender has turned on the pool lights—its turbidity turns their bodies into cloudy blobs, like nebulas seen through amateur telescopes.

She looks to one corner of the large pool, visible from the hot tub, and remembers the woman wore a stunning red dress at the bar over a week ago; it’s hard to say if she’s a tourist because they don’t usually stay this long, at least not without introducing themselves, especially at the pool, where the substance of relation is felt in a way that’s inevitable, chlorinated and often scummy: and so everyone says something to draw attention away from this.

What do you think? A man asks his mother, who is visiting from California: Ninety-four? Ninety-eight?

And he launches into some comparison of California hot tubs, where they like it hot, at least 104.

But the mother doesn’t agree—she dips her toes without enthusiasm.

She offers a tidbit of knowledge about the hot springs she’d visited in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where one tub boasted 115 degrees.

She had spent two hours in it, caught in a conversation so banal as to keep her there past her body’s limitations, a mushroom in the sun.

A mushroom or other nonmammalian fruit; it was too sad to imagine dehydrated animals suffering in the heat.

She’d spent the evening vomiting, suffering the worst migraine of her life, unaffected by medicine.




3:45pm, Oslo, December 2025


She arrived after losing her boyfriend, who was carrying her dog, at an pop-up exhibition on arctic colonialism.

The exhibition was mostly photographs and collections of slides that were put into two video installations in what appeared to be ice houses or former saunas. The images were nostalgic, not judgemental.

She had felt mesmerized and didn’t leave for close to half an hour, which is why her boyfriend couldn’t find her.

When she emerged, he was there, holding the dog and seeming upset. I thought you left without saying goodbye. This was a fair assumption to make. She considered that it was something she would do.

They chose a small sauna that had first been architected by a group of anarchists that thought saunas should be for the people. That idea inspired the rest of the saunas to be built, until it eventually cost about $30 an hour, or a membership. They were part of the city’s main tourist attractions.

 

It seems better to say that the humidity is beading up, or steam dissipates after we open the door after ten or so minutes in the sauna.

And the impulse or desire to simply chase the sound inside, a syntax that is a signal that is faint, where the poem is.

I look for writing that comes from this place seamlessly, seemlessly. But it is a place between words, less sonic than rarefied beyond transmissibility.

The realm of gestures and of temperature and fog.

Of overhearing, overheating? But overhearing without attachment to knowing. The ether gets going as an agent—takes on a personality.




Why had this become hard? It was natural to let things go.



But the middle got muddled.

When she’d arrived late, not realizing the train was under construction on her route, where she’d promised to bring a box of paper, pens to a workshop, and knew from the way gossip circulated later that it mattered—not excused.

It was only possible to hear or be in that frequency as a quality, like a fabric which can be translucent because of its threads.

Let things trail off instead…

Where air is not necessary except as a point to imagine what sound is moving through.

When air was empty enough for poets to measure. A milieu—such as a cube of river—measurable as a general accumulation of unknowns, an “air.” If air, or like it, like a bubble, forces converge on and through it, giving it coherence, momentarily, before it ripples out and pops, becoming air again.

Even atmospheric anomalies become ordinary: cracks in drying drops, one dripping down the rivulet, an emerging string of fluid pearls. A bubble drifting off from its suds.

The middle moves the sauna-goers. They are convinced about it. Being hot and then plunging into the ice to wreck or revitalize the nervous system. To connect to some ideas of balance, resonance with season, modernity is imbalance etc.

Is not the distance between heat and a drop of water, an aging in-between. A sag.

A return to the site—less as physical going than psychical refrain—a movement that includes her dissolution.

Less because of not knowing or half-knowing a language than of being able to remember things exactly. What form.




10:25pm, Texas, late August


The specificities of the conversation are less than the scene of its expression.

Everyday life is variable as a concept, and its significance indeterminate, flitting from person to person as sensations in a moment or a field. Nothing needs to happen here.

A red dress adds something to it, even though it does not appear to the senses in that moment.

In the moments between her waving the foam from side to side, looking to the woman in the red dress, and the conversation about temperature, a group of white people with tattoos and children in innertubes enter the hot tub. 

Now there is hardly a place to fit.

A woman dips her foot gently on the edge, where kids seem more likely to make space and they do—their father—or someone—brings them some red liquid in plastic cups with tops.

One innertube child brushes wet hair away from her face and opens the top to pick out the Maraschino, then leaves the cup opened on the hot tub rim.

With more people in the pool there is a sense of being a bunch of cold crawfish that have been dumped into a boiling pot.

In the hot tub they are not enveloped so much as disaggregated by chemical composition; flesh affected not through emotional responses or even sensory stimulus—but irradiation, the texture of water—the unknowingness of intensities which become events in perception: a woman lifts herself to the edge because she’s begun to itch, or sweat; someone offers to buy a round of drinks; a child chooses to cool off in the pool.

Their repetitions traverse location or time, become syntax.



4:05pm, Oslo, April 2025

The propositions of fluid dynamics describe the forming of dew drops, or breathing, or the vortices made by little crabs in tide pools. The sound of the little dog whining because of the thunder attenuates as it moves through the air. It loses intensity as sound waves interact with humidity, or a conversation.

When she arrived at the sauna it was with sensations of first being mesmerized and then concerned that under hypnosis she was doing something wrong, being neglectful, looking away from the relations that would pull her into the real and coerce her into admitting it. To behave diaphanously was at least possible in a sauna.

Although today it was overcrowded; the sun was out briefly.




9pm, Texas, late August 2023


A kind of flatness grips her. Someone observes that the ratio of men to women in the town is reflected in the tub, which has become a sausage party. The man rumored to pull a gun on someone sinks into the hot tub bench and now is sitting next to her.

She asks about his hat, his half-nakedness. She gets him to say he is only a cowboy from the waist up.

She feels satisfied by this, like she had felt satisfied for yelling at a small crowd at the pool bar for staring at her as she walked from the pool to the bar.

And it is because he has a reputation.

Among many who share the reputation but, in a small town, is subject to its amplification by the (in)frequency in which things happen, among people who know how to circulate the news.

Her tendency to mark distance through moral superiority fails and she drops off again, a failure of maintaining attention on a situation, or a failure to see the stakes, a problem of theory in an age of apocalypse. Crisis was always happening and no amount of thought, especially about relaxation, could rescue action from feelings of futility.

Even so, it did not affect leveraging crisis for the purpose of spectacle, no matter how ordinary. The Half Cowboy is at the pool to create content for the gram.

He photographs an open bag of truffle chips and an open tub of Hot Jalapeño salsa.

He raves about the salsa.

He remarks at the entry of a group of French artists that they are his ticket to France, and begins to network, tipping his Stetson at their shaved heads.




The foam of algorithm tells me to let the sentence fracture under its own claim. I don’t know what that means. But it does not ask me to clarify and I’m grateful. I lifted more stuff onto the pile.

 

Heat in the wee hours.

In the sauna people think carefully in public. 

When it was just notes no one cared about context. Later I took a bath with salts in it that said they’d been carved out of a cave somewhere in Nepal.

When I started to write on the surface I lost interest in myself as a figure that was living. If microbes exist in this scalar realm. We choked it out. There was no need to explain.

The more fragile sounds do not make it there, audibly—a frequency that becomes unmatched by its terms of rarefaction or resonance.

She expressed, as the steam filled the sauna, a regret about the demands that language had on her.

At some point the world folded in on these coercive clauses. The man who was rumoured to pull a gun on someone was run out of town.

It’s just sound, what I am overhearing. As when we made a routine of going to the beach but I didn’t like seeing where it became a beach at a distance, the mountain downturned on the water.

Pointing out its sensuous details was only one approach. The form was just the—sound the breath made passing through an instrument but—because of words—held meaning.

The chatter of others becomes volume, it does not determine the daydream.

Like a strong rejection of a child who asked to pet the dog. Was this miscalculation?—a form of belonging. Later I excused myself from going to a hotel bar as an opportunity or obligation.

 

10:15pm, Texas, September 2023

In the hot tub, things are only ever matter of fact, like a meatloaf. A food that is mashed up into a composite that spreads to fit the shape of a breadpan. A collective subject emerges.

A man making a film about a rigpig who lost his job sits across from her now in the tub, asking her about sulfur and HS2 and explaining the sites where there is some good frac sand.

As he speaks, he squints to avoid drops of chlorine sprayed in his face, and he modulates his volume to account for kids’ shrieking and drunken laughter.

It is darker now. The night would be spectacular if the pool lights did not obscure the stars. Likely it occurs to no one in the pool and no one complains. She is interested, and her interest is likewise modulated by ripples, the glint of sun on the surface of the water, how she contorts her features into likeable postures, to suggest openness.

He talked about the Observatory’s project to study dark energy and its encroachment by 24/7 drilling operations, their menacing LED lights: a metaphor for thick, subterranean goo—oil—how it got into everything—how it competes with the moon for the sky.

Have you heard people in the Permian say—the beauty here is all underground?—he asks.

The bartenders bring hot dogs tubside.

The shareability of the dish is relative to the stability of the dish—like the color that might not be red for you. She had heard this—it would continue to ring in her head, an earworm that became a transposable refrain upon meeting those for whom the phrase mattered sincerely—and for those who thought about it critically—and for those for whom it didn’t make any sense, what beauty? Unless you made it obvious—oil—oh, that.

It seems plausible to assume people live in the sewers underground, like in Las Vegas, that their presence there suggests an injustice above ground.

She remembers the couple she’d talked to in the pool on another occasion, how she was from Appalachia and her dad was a “hillbilly,” and sometimes she said “hisself” as she was talking, without knowing it was regional, like V didn’t know she said “grandpawl” and then pointed out that I too, said some words funny, like “burried” instead of “berried.”

 


8:17pm, Oslo, mid-December 2025


As the steam began to bead up along her—skin. Temperature is a process that can be sensed in dew, she a leaf, a blade of grass in the morning. (And why “blade”? And not string, not a letter or edge?) Against the memory of its transgressions. She is inexact and short of beauty.

I needed only a form fit for something I knew already. And hadn’t we?—already known. There was a wave, generated, suggesting stream-of-consciousness was a kind of writing or a moment in time.

The middle is wafting between solid stoppage—a place, such as a sauna—and its ephemera, the quiet.

Whether a sentence can ask a reader to pause or repair?

A sauna could be object could be ground. Establishing a field in which there are participants who belong. In dimensions of technological mediation or a desire for timelessness. Not on the scene of a simulation, but because it seems outrageous to consider anyone really knows what the other is saying.

If they are saying. Not what they are saying but how, now, if, as a matter of hesitating before saying what you hear if anything.

She thought carefully in public. A vapor of what was pent up and yesterday, in the office, what had struck her was the woman saying it was an attribute of little kids, to reduce everything to the physical or sensory, as if “we’ve” forgotten how to attribute to feelings.

Or that sensation was the smallest unit of a shared object. Later, she’d crushed up an edible flower to put in the tea.

There is only the precise way—or so she was told—and that was the process of coming to word—that could not be said in multiple ways, she couldn’t believe in that.

 

8:43pm, Texas, July 2024


She—as a stable thing—is observing someone—a man—who seems less stable—as he is talking to the foam about how he doesn’t believe anyone went to the moon and only Russians are employed at Blue Origin.

He doesn’t say blue moon out loud because his phone will hear him, and he’d be breaching the NDA he’d signed when he was just four people under Bezos.

He orders another kind of beer.

Things got ugly there and one day he looked around at the ten or so executives and asked himself what he was doing as an engineer among the most brilliant minds in the world, despite himself having walked out on the first day of first grade to pursue a life as an autodidact.

A life where he believes in twin flames probably more than anything.

It happens often, he says, and she says, what happens often. What got ugly.

Foam resists getting taken hostage as a duration—one which obscures a clear view to the bottom of the tub, where the color of chipped toenail polish might index a mood. At the same time it enables her neutrality as a listener. Too much of an obvious tone made her suspicious and quiet, made her want to keep secrets, as if she had any. Most of life she could omit or forget about. Trailing off into vapor, the sun appears and modulates a different form of sociality, one where a lack of melanin shifted them as a dense mass toward more shadowy corners of the pool, or made them grab their hats, or sunscreen. In her listening it seems arbitrary to make meaning out of sound, which was more likely to diffuse into fact.

Someone says he would absolutely not go into space, he doesn’t trust the guys making the engines.

He trusts the guys making Ferraris and Porches, though.

He shrugs at the scientific—for its promise to totalize experience into namable parts.

Someone else says now he is trying to make a life that is sustainable and easy, since he’d figured out before what wasn’t sustainable and hard, or sustainable and hard, or unsustainable and easy.

Previously, he’d taken people climbing using a van he’d outfitted with some bus seats he’d found dumped on the sidewalk years and years ago, which were haunting him now, as they’d shown up here, where V was sitting now, high as fuck on an edible, taking a red bandana and tying it around her head, talking to the air about a business plan she’d just hatched about making holograms out of characters from Melrose Place, who would sit next to you at social gatherings and hold your hand.

He smokes in the tub, then drifts to the large pool where the French women are smoking and where he can smoke with impunity, not suffering the subtleties of people waving hands at their noses or turning away.

He perches on the edge, keeping the cig there as he crosses his knees, looking in her direction, as if considering when to make the move to rejoin, or waiting for permission in a smile or wave of invitation.

D is there too, wearing a purple jersey he’d gotten somehow from the high school.

He launches into matters of cultural history near Rochester and lists figures who had transcended the place to become something, and he repeats them in a litany twice: Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, The Wright Brothers; figures that both in their individuality and their repetition seemed to flatten the tone of his enthusiasm so that it has an opposite effect on her attention, as if radical celebrity were an acid wash on the denim of America.

the next day, 11:00 am


The good thing is that nothing out here cares if you appreciate it or not, which she supposed was a kind of privilege of isolation.

She remembers the wild boar she almost hit on the road—several months ago—a black bundle with some speed. She’d never seen a wild boar before—and it was nighttime—so she’d said to herself in the car is that a feral hog? And thought of the meme she’d never quite understood—probably because it was an urban joke—to equate the rural with their concerns about animals, where everything is either a pest or a pet.

She did not hit the hog—and is unsure why she’s thinking of it now.

People recede into shadows; shadows recede into the bar, where a petrified cat is perched on the wall, a testament to what they’d found when they were cleaning out the place, same as that old piano.

Some moments pass during which tubgoers dip in and out, bring back drinks from the bar, or shake the drops from their necks, like inverted dogs.

Now, coming back, the Moon Man from yesterday parts some bubbles on his way to her.

He says I have two pieces of information for you: one is that Joe Rogan was on a podcast with an anarchist talking about the Unabomber.

The other is that the water dowser I’d wanted to apprentice with lost his job as water commissioner and that might explain why he wasn’t calling back or answering emails.

When he finishes delivering the information he parts the bubbles again and walks to the other side of the pool, says some words to no one in particular and gets out, puts pants on but not a shirt, and joins some girls who have begun to dance at the bar.

I drift to something happening on the other side. Time gets marked indistinctly in durations of pop song or reference to podcasts. I let the podcast slide, uninterested. Or what happens in listening too long for something to chime with a feeling—down, edgy, always approximating rage, a tinge of optimism— as when Moon Man caught the tone of dismissal and moved himself to the edge of the tub, saying he didn’t want to be near her toxicity.

She, also down, edgy, and approximating rage, was too tired to be offended. The music shifts from “Gangnam Style,” to “Whoop There is Is,” to three songs in a row by the Cranberries.

K laments that E told the bartenders to not play reggaeton anymore, given the demographic tendencies of the pool clientele.

V wonders if the bartender knows how the lead Cranberry died: she drowned in a bathtub.

Do you think he plays Cranberries at closing time for a reason? She asks him.

He knows. He does. They all laugh about this.

They laugh about hot tub water like impressionist painters laughed about qualities of light and how that changed throughout the day—affected how you saw things—paintbrush as an instrument of measuring atmospheric qualities and its effect on the figures.

Against realism, which aimed to trap human features in crisp strokes and colors of exactness.

There was a real outcry of injustice to form among the painterly elite at the time, citing sloppiness—a lack of skill—rather than a way of attending to the figure’s relationship to the ground—the background—the field of wheat or the blue overchair or the apparition of a man sitting at the table in the shadows.

There is a woman blurring into her atmosphere—a slow settling into the circadian contingencies of time of day and humidity and barometric pressure—and season—and proximity—and etc.

Something is loud in the air—the jets, a drunk couple, the nightclub music playing favorites from the early 00s, the too-bright lights—the burnt out conversations from the previous events and spaces that had been more obstacular to her hot tub endeavor than enabling of a social feeling—the invitation to Zumba—the reference to bad impressionist landscapes—some hiddenness of eroticism playing itself out across ignoring and being ignored.

She overhears V discuss the dancing girls, triggered by the sounds of a nightclub, who giggle and sway while sipping their drinks with straws.

They become the subject of conversation even though no man is looking at them, which might also be the point.

She—I—could not accept a form of thought that was already belonging to its milieu, like transmissions crackling in the ether. Instead always stunned to share a perception, to not be alone.

It came from being displaced in space—moved continents—the experience of being airborne and in suspension over water—the loss of hours—became dream, delusion.

The friend was already practiced at the heating and plunging into the ice. Therefore it took longer for her to become exhausted enough with the heat to desire plunging into the ice. Whereas I could feel my heart beating and that seemed wrong.

Jealousy urged me to release her.

On the impatience of details. The coercion of thought to do one thing and not another.

11:00 pm, Texas, September 2023


She can describe the light in detail as it changes throughout the day. She is less interested in her inner life, though it is probably flooded with moods—foamy textures of overlapping sensations of nothingness or its approximations—managing time zones—listening to the wind upward of 6 hours a day without desire to do otherwise—not waving in the truck as she drives by—pretending the person who fired her is not also shopping at the grocery store.

Foam becomes traceable. And measurable—through digressions—the light in certain windows in LA—compared with Oslo—in Texas—and the rhythm of the spire touching the door of the grocery store at evening—and the flood of orange light in her own windows—whether they are heavily curtained.

One half of a drunk couple is wearing two swimsuits; no one knows what she is talking about, but tubgoers smile and nod as if they do.

Now Moon Man is standing in the doorway and the rest of them are shifting around to make themselves comfortable. Most are unrecognizable—tourists —their presence reminds them this is a Where where things happen, an epicenter from which a felt zone of various densities expresses itself as sensation, movement, or shift in phase through the way it appears anomalous in a landscape.

A high-end Prada shoe store along the Western horizon.

A stylish pair of hot pink sunglasses worn in Instagrammed composition with cacti and tumbleweeds. A cartoonish moustache and a “darlin’” or a “ma’am” spoken by men who everyone knows are not really ranchers, but derive their appearance from John Wayne movies.

Impressions of a situation dissolve into fact of expression. There’s a crowd, and they are not wearing cowboy hats, they are wearing short brimmed canvas versions of those, which are very in right now, somewhere, maybe even here.

A concentration of it metastasizes into power—now it’s all anyone talks about.


Each time I do the dishes I am afraid of getting my hand stuck in the drain. I watch the water excuse itself instead, swirling, and in the swirl a sensation that if I looked too long I could also be sucked in.

3:09 pm, Texas, September


Now an artist is calling them earthlings and asking them to respond while she waves the foam around in the tub.

She calls them itsy bitsy earthlings and asks them to talk about how they swim in a sea of air. Two people walking along the edge of the pool demonstrate this, with their arms swishing through a space bedecked in desires to be seen, to belong—not a viscous underwater after all, but a transparency marked by those movements—now I am a fish!

In her fish-ness she exaggerates what is human by walking on two legs, wearing jeans and a crop top. She pokes a hole in a moment by doing as Simon Says, while everyone is sitting still, filming the swimmers with their phones.

Simon asks What is an aggressive air? How many fish are in the sea? And the fish and the earthlings and their filmers then Google the answer. With their little earth ears underwater.

Don’t eat…don’t eat, Simon Says, we are going to grow trees together with our tears and a theremin, we are going to listen to the sounds around us—coyotes, a truck passing by, someone’s car door slamming, a nervous cough, a sigh.

Now she is sitting next to a practical man. He is sitting next to some hecklers. He is whispering about goats and chickens during a drum solo over the speakers, about knowing a thing or two about drum solos. She laughs and says Oh but this is art, to mean that she had felt entranced by it, had ignored the bubbles and the drunks with her eyes closed, so that no one could touch her.

Along the wall is a man she wants to avoid, because of an altercation in which she felt trapped in the bubble of his chronicity, a timing that didn’t match with hers, an exactness and hers was not, which made her feel that any contact whatsoever was a zone of proximity in which she was in danger of spaghettifying, like the edge around a black hole.

She was late once, then imprecise with her measurements of the sky, then wishy-washy about picking up some plates she had agreed to buy.

That collision of rhythms was fatal to the something they were trying to be and she remained caught in its consequence.

Better to be among strangers, momentary and renewable in the tub.

A figure might be the cottonwoods planted along the pool building, the way the wind took to them.

Or the man who decries their existence as invasive, but for the same reason tolerates their presence: The only good thing about a cottonwood is the sound of the wind blowing through it.
11:59 pm, Texas, March 28


Imaginary friends come to the tub, where the jets are on. It’s only 35 degrees outside, so it’s empty. The light seems to touch the surface of the swimming pool like a finger making various diffractive patterns in the water, which appear as shadows at the bottom of the pool.

Really the finger is a breeze or a bug, landing briefly, a moment of imbalance in temperature, in pressure.

Periodically, the jet will be hotter for a minute or two, then return to homeostasis. It would be nice if it stayed hot. A desire expressed by a man who enters the tub later. He turns up the jets as if to increase the temperature by pressure, which causes chlorinated water to spray up into her face and obscure any other sound. But for now it’s just her in the water, watching the smaller bubbles become bigger and then disappear in paisley patterns, rounded out by pressure underneath and air above.

The bartender comes over to ask if she wants a cold one. She feels kind of bad; he speaks to her from his employment, a smile is a way of eliciting gratuity, chitchat a means of filling the air confined by the time a shift begins and ends. He seems like a restless worker— deciding to clean the pool of leaves or other debris, despite an absence of swimmers.

In the time between her entry into the tub and the entry of another, she reads on her phone. This is difficult; the sun is in the way, she is not wearing her glasses. But needs to occupy her thought out of shame for staring into the water without task, as if it might draw attention to herself as strange or sad, the pool-cleaning worker whose restlessness would be measured by her inertia, her ability to relax and to be served, though she knows that he knows that she, too, is only enjoying the perk of being a wage worker at the same hotel.

And to alleviate the crush of boredom that is not enough to get her out of the pool and somewhere else, where there are others; she’d heard on the radio something about inflammatory diets causing a tendency to socially withdraw, lonelinessso she asks the worker about food.

He says he’s on a keto diet and can’t enjoy the imported breads from Italy that are drawing crowds to a small restaurant nearby, nor the beer she’s got on a coaster. These foods are processed—but chicken, pork, bacon, that’s all okay.

The artist she’d overheard at a bonfire some weeks before had bought goats off of Craigslist, named them all, then systematically shot them in the head with a pistol. In the name of being a more conscious consumer of meat. Everyone was laughing.

And so she turns away from the keto man whose smile is fake. The vapor rises from the tub which is not hot enough. If it were Oslo, it would blur the lines of bodies which would be naked and stark against the snow. E said everyone goes during lunch—imagine—the breakup to the workday.

A molecular process happens. Blood vessels widen to circulate more oxygen through the body and to cool off—where sweating is offset in water. The water makes flesh buoyant and lessens a gravitational pull. The heartbeat accelerates to compensate.

She imagines a cartoon of a boneless man with three curlicues of hair on his pink chest, sinking into himself in a tub whose mouth is drawn out almost the width of it. The mouth suggests satisfaction, the eyes are looking somewhere with the ends pointed downward, as if to be relaxed means your features are drawn toward the earth, to melt into it, becoming soft in the soil.

2:34 pm, April 2024


Are you there, in the ether?

Her hands float above her knees that the intractability of others may be due to their rhythms—which she prefers in the dubstep playing over the speakers.

Whereas a crowd seemed to gather at the sandwich shop. An activity that would linger on in her memory all afternoon as she thought about what so-and-so was wearing or gesticulating about. Or how he treated his dog. And what prompted his asking her about her dog when she’d arrived. And whether that earned her a spot on the conveyor belt of his daily relations, that cycled everyone through like miniature cereal boxes, briefly filling and stopping then starting again, resembling the other boxes, to be forgotten in their sameness and dismissed.

What use are you? She would ask the other boxes, to see if they had some insight. But usually the rhythm was perfunctory, of no use, and no reason to dwell on.

Perhaps the pool was her thought, an extension of her electrochemical processes, an electromagnetic field churning and folding in and through itself.

Water and air as varied temperatures and the nonconductive sheath of skin allowing sensation that is not electric, merely chemical.

Too long in the tub and a moment of a breeze felt divine. She draws her leg up to the ledge to let her foot experience the air. An absurd posture that is perfectly acceptable under water.