over and over

up early Sunday AM, down Hawthorne Blvd and SE 37th w/ coffees and scones and 2 young kids to watch an old friend passing nearby in road race and a surging tide of runners pass in great swells, expelled from some great bottomless ocean. I am suddenly overcome as I watch - the sense memory of running/training-for several marathons myself, starting with 3 I trained for a million years ago in Los Angeles and in particular one in 2007 meant to demarcate my survivorship after my brain tumor enterprise and all parts therein in 2005 - as well as the simple metaphor of standing, participating, moving despite odds, body, history, as well as the non-stop nature of the bodies: Bodies running, then more, then more, then more. And a line from a song I used to listen to frequently once upon a time loops through my head as I stand holding my son (who's watching the 4 white guys play rasta music out of the rain under their small canvas tent) "...over and over we die one after the other..." and the bodies are all at once confirmation and defiance of this.



later, I have 2 hours to myself so I see Sunset Boulevard at the Laurelhurst, a film I am very familiar with but it too is bottomless. my past and present intersect on and off screen, the aspirant screenwriter who lived in LA a million years ago reads the film different than the non-LA based director of now, but then there has also been time/space in between, and I am exactly between Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond now, so I understand her in different ways, her delusion once so grotesque now more comprehensible and human and hence more tragic. Also, the precision and perfection of some of the shots and tightness of script and casting and score - all a marvel as per usual

There is connection to be made between these two events, these two paragraphs but I don't know how to say it or even really what it is but I can feel it. Something about perspective and sheer luck of being able to have it. Forward and backward and forward and over and over one after the other.