there are some social circles where leaving hairs stuck to the bar of soap in the shower is a serious infraction against the prevailing system of decorum. I have lost sight of my dreams for the moment. can’t remember how long it has been since there were real ones that guided both internal and external events. head down to concentrate on the slick sidewalk which turns out not to be so treacherous as it appears what with sharp pea-sized fragments of shattered granite scattered almost everywhere. a first sign of spring comes to sight — small melted rivulets cut into the ice that covers the walkways — where the drains from the roofs lead — the sun is heating the roof and that slightly-warmed water is making its way down to street-level where, wrapped in shadow, it retains enough energy to cut canyons through the ice before spreading out and forming frozen deltas of ice with no gravel. these are the most dangerous areas to avoid or at least walk with that stiff-legged demeanor meant to stave off the possibility of complete imbalance and potential disaster. all on a walk out to the lake, and it IS frozen, somehow this is surprising, is it safe to walk on? there are ski tracks and footprints, though not too many of them. aiming towards the harbor breakwater (why a breakwater in a small inland lake?) I walk through the stretched-out moon-shadow of a factory smokestack cast far into the white darkness by the almost full moon. past the breakwater. to some center which is defined only by an absence of Lights. it is too bright for celestial mystery, only a fraction of terrestrial silence, but with the brightness there is sound or at least the impression of sound. noise, culture-noise. what about going to a cabin in the woods? deep in snow-covered trees and the muffling shapes of inverted nothing. no sauna even yet. no hot water bath. shopping at the Euromarket barely 50 meters from the front door of the College. having to scrutinize each package, all except the ones that I already know from these previous lives here in this land, anything new requires self-conscious label-reading, hoping for a bit of Swedish that I can decode, the Finnish still largely a mystery — vocabulary expanding though, to say, 200 words. like a catalog to draw from. nothing like what language is, at least mother-tongue. a poor substitute that carries little if anything but bare naked meaning. who cares about that except for those cases where that is the only role — a priest reading the last rites, hail Mary mother of god, our father who art, in the beginning, I am the Alpha and the Omega. so sick of the teevee in the foyer of the two-bedroom guest suite, downstairs there is a decent tape deck in the lecture hall, Miles/Coltrane, yes, something to hear and to live by. I struggle to face the fact that once again, this locus for my text-based musings has no direction, no energy, and, worst of all, no spirit. Given my activities for the past five months (can it be only that short a time that I have been into this newest wave of teaching/employment?), perhaps I should not be expecting a flood of creative impulses and action to be sustained, energies have been aimed elsewhere.