smooth

GRAVEL

19.  The earth weighs 6.6 sextillion tons, though many school teachers would begin, "It weighs nothing at all because it's floating in space!" I wouldn't call the earth "floating." It doesn't even orbit around the sun, strictly speaking. The sun-moon-earth triad is itself hurdling through the universe at such a high rate of speed, some 500 kilometers / second, (compared to 30 kilometers / second for the earth alone, pretending the earth revolves around the sun), that their combined trajectories resemble more the flying braids of a young girl on a horse than halos of pure orbiting. Academics are ponderous about these things, though they needn't be. Yesterday my roommate, who has kind of a stubborn meanness, pretended he would act all hurt if I didn't read a 30-odd page essay entitled, "The Hand." I did it. You can sum the whole thing up with, "Some people's hands are alive; they're often good at art." Last night I awoke with an obscure dream about a neighbor across the street, who in fact said something quite simple to me, which I couldn't quite grasp or hold in my memory. It didn't really bother me. I knew if it was really important to my life, it would make itself known of its own accord. Sure enough, in a second (Dream) a voice from a garage across the street says, "Easy money, huh?" and adds soon thereafter, "Sounds serious!" (Fin) I woke an hour ago to the sound of a worker scraping paint off the wall outside my bedroom, and realized, "Sounds serious!" fits perfectly as the 2nd choice in the 88th category of taxi1010.com. Did you know San Francisco is traveling some 900 miles an hour around the planet? I'm amazed all the air doesn't fly off into outer space! Now, where was I? (Dream) One of my sisters and I are spending the night in our living room at Gibson Island for some reason. We have a game. We're just waiting for Mom to leave. In the game, one of us gets naked, and we haven't decided which one it will be tonight. Mom still hasn't gone out, and in the meantime, we begin to get the idea maybe both of us can get naked at the same time. (Fin)