Fix your kerning you son of a bitch! Spending the night in Baltimore tonight, a motel serviced by pneumatic tube, and the guests on either side of my room are having an accidental conversation with each other. Doesn’t always match up, but sometimes—

“That’s … yeah but that’s not why I brought you here.” “Oh is that a fact.” “Don’t play all stupid.” “Just give it to me straight.” “You remember what happened fifty years ago today?” “Fix your goddamn kerning!”

It’s happened to me before, four or five times, like the time in Las Cruces where I was trapped in a Raymond Carver scene for like two hours, holy shit did I wish I was seriously dead. But it’s still a curious experience, listening to a conversation that will never be heard by anyone else, a conversation that was never meant to be heard, not by me or by the participants or anyone. Only this time around did I have the presence of mind to transcribe it on the local stationery (“The Ballast — A Quiet Slumber Afore Shipping Out”), because surely it would have some significance someday.

And yet. But I. But I think I’m going to leave it here. Trifolded and tucked inside the Gideon’s. When I wake up in the morning I’ll be torn — was it the right thing to do? Will it lose its power, being shared with someone else like that? A question I ask myself every single morning, in a wide variety of contexts.