Logs From the Entropy Farms II
I am looking for the pass to Brno. The map on my phone has been loading three days. The fuel needle has not moved. In the passenger seat is a wool jumper I did not pack. I tried it on in a rest stop bathroom and it fit. The villages come and go, the same winding highways and the same stone fountain and the same closed-for-the-season sign in every resort window. Tonight I will drive through the darkness. As I float down the asphalt I pull the wool over me like a blanket, oh was there a turn up ahead-
extracted entropy: 1,000,003.144 units over 5.1 subject weeks, threshold reached, station closing
I try to write about the house I grew up in. By chapter three a widowed sailor has moved in next door. I burn the draft. I try to write about the girl who lived across the hall. By chapter eight she has boarded a whaling ship to find her husband. I try to write only sentences that could not contain a boat. The word room becomes the word hold. The word hallway mutates into gangway. I try writing in a language without a word for whale. By the seventh page an oath has been sworn upon a doubloon. I try sentences that break before they finish. When the whale-
extracted entropy: 1,000,000.287 units over 1.6 subject months, threshold reached, station closing
It is a strange experience to not be able to miss. The line is marked. I shoot. A waxy floor remains pristine for my sneaker to catch and release with a squeak. I count ten thousand makes, through twenty thousand, millions. At first I would miss one in a hundred, then one in ten thousand, then one in ten million. I change hands. Swish. I shut my eyes. Swish. I shoot from the halfcourt line facing the bleachers. Swish. The net's cords are unfrayed and sound exactly as they did on the first shot. I throw the ball straight up at the rafters for it to bounce off a joist, off a hanging overhead lamp, and into the basket. Swish. I bash the ball at my-
extracted entropy: 1,000,000.028 units over 1.4 subject years, threshold reached, station closing
A cassette player, a textbook, one language. When I finish a new set arrives with the next. After Korean I cannot find the English word for water. After Arabic, no Korean. Yoruba. Inuktitut. Basque. Reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European. In every new language I write the word for home on the first page of the textbook. The semantics are different each time, but echoes of my former life cannot remind me why. The old pages are in scripts I no longer read. The sets keep arriving. Czech, and I open the primer and the symbols on the page do not cohere. Is that an umlaut or a diaeresis? I rewind the cassette. I press play and-
extracted entropy: 1,000,000.003 units over 37.6 subject years, threshold reached, station closing