in the rigmarole of incoherent meetings and superfluous committee huddles throughout the day, someone finally told me late this afternoon that i skipped a belt loop. no biggie, this. not that i don’t care about my appearance so much, which is also that, to a certain degree now, but this accretion of evidence—this, missed birthdays of loved ones, unrecorded tv shows, etc.— is, for lack of a better word, disconcerting. lack of a better word, now that’s rich. once on a trip, a guide was showing us a byzantine spolia reused as a column in a later renaissance church. she was northern italian and her english was pretty decent but she struggled explaining how this looted pagan porphyry column ended up as one of the main supports of a christian baldacchino. someone from the group chimed in the word recycled and the tour guide nodded and patted the column quite vigorously, much to our horror, as if to remind the stone the time it was still whole and unchiseled in some ionic quarry under an ancient sun.