But sometimes worlds collide, or rather sometimes, when you go back, you go back further than you intended.

Elizabeth II is wearing a hat, round and solid like a cartoon bomb, with an enormous rim. She’s getting out of a big shiny white car. She’s smiling and shaking the hands of children. She’s wearing impeccable white gloves. It’s Friday, 2nd February 1974 - not a day that goes down in history, not a day most Bougainvilleans have reason to remember.

because i had a theory that
when you’re born
you’re a complete person)
i wanted to know
and i found out that it’s so
that you were
you) are
you

Recall Jeanne Dielman, sitting at the kitchen table, peeling potatoes endlessly, killing time.

Somewhere close by the guerrilla is hiding in the monte, where, as the people around here say, they are the law of the forest.

I knew my mother’s words were meant to shove me out of the nest and into the air. It was an act of mercy. So, why did I feel like she had just tied an anvil to my leg?

I wonder what history will make of us. We that had it quite hard/not so hard. Not at war (not here). At one end our spirits are eroded. We are undecided.

Our silver-spun wheels singing again on the loose chip ground.

His motions and catchphrases are like untranslatable words in a foreign language: you cannot say what they mean, only when and how to use them. “Not like that, like that.” Until you get it: “Just like that.”

During the documentary shoot last week, Herzog Jr recounted a native Canadian myth about a gigantic strawberry one would meet in the afterlife, and how tasting it would trap you in the land of the dead. Well, I could be meeting that strawberry today.

A wanderer tells of others who have, like him, walked through earthquakes.

As trade grew during the 1840s and ’50s - above all the opium trade, and the neutrality of the term ‘trade’ should never obscure the biopolitical siege that was underway, a slow parasitism of addiction and depletion - the British government came to realise the value of Hong Kong.

There was a magnifying glass in the snow.

Opening leaves of happiness or at least the switching on of brain functions and partial pushing back of human frontiers.