Yesterday, while swimming a lovely green 5k, I had a talk with myself that consisted of two words: shut up. It was wonderful.

8 July 23.16

This rainy night, monsoon receding and a compelling purple blanketing the sky, I feel the ghosts of this small corner of Jersey City, once a place of gangs and violence and trash. Still the wildlife has either persisted or returned, and I have a sense that the incoming and outgoing currents flush out the vibrations from before, returning a little bit of wilderness with each tide.

It occurs to me that historically, and especially in the literary world, harbors have harbored ghosts; spectres and souls have haunted harbors. I do feel that here, and it also brings to new light my fear of the Hudson and my sense of swimming "under" the City, wherein lurks violence, grimegrit of centuries of history, the unknown. But this place has a light Victorian or even Edwardian touch, gentle and at peace. It is the perfect setting for a spooky romance:

Sometimes I imagine that I hear a deep instrument playing; and there is a man, an extremely good-looking, wild-haired character, who seems to be wearing a tuxedo. I've also seen him in an overcoat with a black beret. He is tall and lanky. I feel that sometimes he watches me, and I'm simultaneously afraid and intrigued. Often I wonder if I myself am, in part, some shade of a misty-eyed beauty of a drowning case, or if my friend could, perhaps, have more than strange coincidence in common with a nineteenth-century landscape artist from Nyack who drowned in the Hudson, unable to swim when he boarded an ill-fated Brooklyn-bound sloop.

How much of our action is the fulfillment of past human failures? How many of those are specific? People spend their lives fulfilling others' dreams, or their own, through exploration, cultivation and practice. Originality cycles in and out, as it must, because many of the greatest human ideas are the most ancient—and there are too many to count. Whistling, instrumental music, sailing, engine-building and mathematics—all these are our own, and in practice become more so. Those who fail to fulfill talent or desire...are they doomed to remain, attach, and fulfill through others?

What would happen to me, were I to suffer either untimely death, or worse, simple unrealized potential? I do believe that the matter has most to do with what sort of vibrations one puts into the world. But were I a ghost, a bhoot, what sort would I be? How would I haunt? What would I want? Given a choice, where would I haunt?