last night, all night, I heard
a per­son scream at the top
of his throat, the following:

the only way to truly know
a man is to fight him. and while

that in and of itself was enough
of a thing to stir up, at the top of
my wrist, a hand­ful of inter­views, it
gave me the sort of pause I sel­dom
have the chance to enjoy these
days:

some­times, when the truth
isn’t as impor­tant as it would ordi­nar­ily
like itself to be or, when, by
an occur­rence equidis­tant from
coin­ci­dence and fate, you are almost con­tent to
add your­self to that sham reg­istry of
the ordi­nary, I think, you have to
con­sider for a time the dif­fer­ence
between what or which

whys make a man and what or which
whys make him out to be any­thing of
pur­ported worth. I think his value is tied
up in or con­cerned with
or accord­ing to, and I think his
self is unpack­aged. I think he costs
what you say he costs, and I think
he breathes whether or not you
can hear his chest heav­ing (these are
the sorts of things with which I have

come to spend a great deal
of time grap­pling), whether or not
you are close enough to him to
see his frame fill with air and watch
him spill it out, whether or not your
hand is on his back when he raises
his arms to stretch, to touch every­thing,
to feel no mar­gins but, the thing is,

you ought to be that close, and would be
if your fists fell off.