Juni 23
Donnerstag
Dust is – The dust in the air (I hear Mouse crunching his dry food behind me – like the sound of being tackled really hard in rugby: gristle and crunch) – the dust in the air is in the air, and the air isn’t empty. My cancers (working). Our house is on a quiet road but two doors away from a busy road, and thirty pace away from a petrol station, and within close sight of a railway line, and beneath the flight path to Heathrow. If I start to die of lung cancer, there will be various factors – blames – possibilities I’ll think of. One of the main ones will be the location of our house. (I’m suddenly aware of the lymph nodes in my neck. they feel gristled, ready to go rogue.) I breathe particles and in between them I breathe, in the smaller, spacier spaces, I breath particulates. Very rarely, I can smell the petrol – it was one of my favourite smells, when I was a boy. Petrol meant drives with my father to service stations, antique shops, warehouses and houses way off in the country – where someone repaired wickerwork or fixed grandmother clocks. It meant the Peugeot 503 on long straight French roads between parallel rows of poplar trees, or on autoroutes, or mountain roads as twisty as the blood vessels of the human kidney which are called? Petrol. Santa Pod Raceway. Cape Canaveral. We will need a car to take Flipper to the hospital, if there’s an emergency, and to visit his grandparents, if he survives his emergencies. I sneezed, twice. Was it thinking about particulates, or writing about them, or would I have sneezed anyway even if I’d been on the subject of hermetically sealed chambers, vacuums, voids? And now I want to look up that bit of the body I want to mention – the Loops of Leprechaun? – the Hoops of Bayern Leverkuhsen? – but I know if I do, I will be drawn into screen-time, and I will write less. Later. As far as I know, I am not yet dying.
Is there anything Mum would like me to do for her? Shall I write something for her? Does she want me to promise never to write anything about that? (Avoid that conversation.)
The Loop of Henle – actually not as twisty as the distal convoluted tubule or the proximal convoluted tubule.