I’m put in mind of the novels of E.M. Forster and Henry James, wherein Europeans and Americans of the middle- or upper-middle class, during the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, ‘tour’ another country to learn about it, to experience its novelty, and to be charmed or edified by it. As if that could be something that would happen now. Even if it might seem to be something that continues to happen outwardly. By which I mean, in semblance.

Of course, the age we are living in has somewhat diminished our capacity for romanticization anyway, insofar as romanticization depends on mystery and unknowing, or unfamiliarity, and this age has done much to eradicate those things. By way of, for example, the internet.

On the other hand, I know that I have a romantic idea of it, which means that I know that it is something other than what I imagine it to be.

I haven’t spent much time in California, and have a romantic idea of it, especially of Los Angeles, which I think is not far from Pasadena.

In the car, before I put the key in the ignition and started the engine, I opened the Raymond Chandler novel and read the first page or two, then closed it and dropped it on the passenger seat next to me. What was happening was that the private detective who narrates the novel was arriving at a house with a sprawling lawn and a long driveway, somewhere in a wealthy neighborhood of the town of Pasadena, in California, in the early 1940s.

I told her I’d seen it, which is true, and said something else I can’t quite remember, I think about Humphrey Bogart, whose acting I enjoy, before thanking her and going out the door of the store and into the parking lot. The door has a string of bells attached to it that jingle as you go in and out.

“There is a very good movie of his book The Maltese Falcon,” the woman said, referring to Dashiell Hammett, “with Humphrey Bogart in the role of Sam Spade.”

I remember telling her, as I stood there at the counter while she rang up the purchase and fished around for a bookmark to give me, that I generally do not read a lot of detective fiction, but that I like the work of these two writers (Chandler and MacDonald), as well as that of their contemporary, Dashiell Hammett.

When I brought that book up to the register, having found it on the shelf, the woman who works there (and who I think must be the owner) asked me something about it, or commented on it, and we talked for a minute about it and about another author of noir or hardboiled novels named Ross Macdonald, because when I’d first entered the store and she’d asked me if she could help me find anything I’d mentioned his name.

Speaking of books, I also bought recently a second-hand copy of the detective novel The High Window, by Raymond Chandler, though not at the same bookstore I told you about just now, but at a different one — one that is down in Fort Collins, not here in Cheyenne.

Besides, sadness, like any emotion, after a certain point can become an indulgence, and in fact an occasion of sin.

Because I’m sad, that is. Though not in a weepy or disconsolate way, but in a long, slow, this-is-my-life, realization way. Not that there isn’t, also, a lot in my life about which I’m not sad. There is. Meaning, there’s a lot in my life for which I am grateful and happy.

Which I suppose might be another reason I am writing these entries.

If I was a dad I imagine that, during much of those times, I’d be attending to my child or my children, with whoever the mother happened to be, but, sadly, I am not a dad.

I go to that bookstore two or three times a week, at random times of day, as a way of getting out of the house and having something to do. Not that there aren’t more pressing things I could be doing, when I’m not doing what I refer to as my ‘work,’ but, whatever those things are, I guess I find them less appealing.

Later, I drove to a second-hand bookstore and found a copy of Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Though when I say I “found a copy” I don’t mean I was looking for one in particular, or that I’d been thinking about it, but only that I happened to come across it while browsing, and decided to buy it. Because it was only a dollar and because, as well, I don’t know what happened to the copy I once had.

After I’d gone for a jog this morning, but before I’d gotten in the shower, I’d wandered into the front room, where the TV is, and had passed some time by watching a handful of these pictures cycle through, in sequence.

They have that same sense of foreboding that one cannot attribute to typical sources of terror. By which I mean, I suppose, objects or persons or events in an environment that reveal themselves, without question, to be threats.

There is something in them that reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock. And also of Edward Hopper.

Of course, the scenes do give the impression of spontaneity, because they depict moments that have been staged to look as though they are spontaneous and unplanned. Which is part of their allure and their beauty.