iPhones as European weddings

30 August 2021

His eccentricity was in being reputable. My trigger's so small the world explodes around it. Sometimes you don’t know you pulled it until it’s pulled back. Don’t look in the face of the gun, but at the trigger finger. Some get operated on when they get stuck, unable either to spring back or to keep pulling. It’s cease-fire by damaged cartilage, more impasse than agreement. You can see Trump’s agreement with the Taliban between lines of bodies at Kabul airport. We attend only to the aftermath, not the origin, though we keep looking for beginnings to our own trees. Ida's first death was man by tree. Tweets kept coming in to save people on a roof in Lafitte or Laplace. The phone was at 7%, so please hurry. An old woman who couldn’t swim, three old women and a man in an attic, or am I remembering Katrina, when tweets were signs on rooftops. My grandfather misspelled his son’s name in his diary, the day of his christening; spelling mistakes tug my strings, grief on the other end. Except when I graded. Aura was in his having written at all. From now on, he will be words to me, script below the Wea and the Ther that frame the date. The entries are really boring, my cousin says, all about hay and visiting other farms. He hardly mentions his wife, Marie. My friend Marie died two years ago; her daughter offered me one of her books, but then it got given away. I’d see not her words, but words she read, so to play audience to the audience that was our friend, imagine the tilt of her mental lens, the after-effects in words she set on paper. Bryant puts a piece of paper next to new colors of paint; paper forces the iPhone to gauge the colors accurately. Otherwise, it “corrects” them to what he calls “a European wedding.” I say the phone’s a white supremacist, but he claims it just learns from experiences it can’t explain. Another palette would another mistaken color make. A policeman (of one color) pulls a couple’s (of another) cooler down a road in Louisiana, while the mother holds her infant. It’s a photograph of concern. Tune your conscience to that one.