Which I know is a weak argument for the aesthetic value of anything. I can’t decide myself whether I like the way it looks or not.

Of course, that vehicle is eminently safe, or anyway is marketed to be, but at least it looks unusual, which can’t be said for the majority of vehicles a person will see on the road. Even if you think it’s unsightly it at least gets your attention.

An exception would be Tesla’s Cybertruck, which people who hate Elon Musk love to hate.

Cars today are mostly all the same. That’s a generalization, but there’s truth in it. They all look inoffensive and safe.

One of its tires is completely flat and is sagging against the ground. I imagine writing a note to the owner, and leaving it beneath one of the windshield wipers, asking if they’re interested in selling. Of course, A. and I don’t need another vehicle, and couldn’t afford right now to maintain another anyway, but what of it? The vehicle looks to me like a model from the late 1970s or early ‘80s. To me that is one of the best eras of cars.

After that I jogged a few more blocks in the winter sunlight, before turning right and beginning to head home by a slightly different route. I passed an old white Cadillac that has been parked in the same spot, against the curb, ever since A. and I bought the house we’re living in, or anyway ever since I began jogging through this neighborhood shortly after we bought the house, and which Cadillac I love to look at, because it is old and because I like Cadillacs.

A block or two later I passed a mailman, in uniform, getting out of his mail truck, which he’d parked on the side of the road, and when he saw me jogging and I’d said hello to him he said, “I wish I was doing that,” and I said, “It’s not so cold today,” even though it was a little cold, and there was still snow on the roads and on the sidewalks. Because that was the first thing that it occurred to me to say.

Jogging this morning, as I passed the cemetery, I heard the distinctive sound of a goose, or geese, honking, and looking up I saw two of them flying low, and in formation, as they descended at an angle, preparing to land, about fifty meters from the road, among the tombstones.

My parents are visiting Cheyenne this weekend. They are scheduled to arrive by plane this afternoon. I will pick them up at the little regional airport in the Highlander.

As Hemingway writes, in his treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

And the one circumstance that always exists, for all of us, no matter who we are, is our mortality.

Anyway, no writer is writing entirely about themself, even when they take themselves as the subject of their work. They always end up writing about something else as well, because the self can be written about only in relation to the circumstances in which it exists.

Only a tedious writer thinks an ‘interesting’ subject will make for an assuredly compelling book. It may or may not, depending on the talent of the writer.

Because subject is irrelevant, really, in all good writing. A good writer can address himself to any subject.

For example, I too have made myself, here, the subject of my writing, and perhaps, in doing so, have been guilty of self-indulgence. But, if that is the case, the self-indulgence is due only to a failure of my talent, not to an unwise or inappropriate choice of subject.

Of course, the criticism isn’t necessarily true, or fair, even if it can be true or fair. No subject is off-limits to a writer, though the risk of self-indulgence is always there, in every subject to which he or she attends.

I think of him now in relation to that criticism of Montaigne — that an author is ‘self-indulgent’ who makes himself the subject of his writing.

I remember going through a stage when I was really into F. Scott Fitzgerald and reading his book of nonfiction The Crack-Up, the title essay of which recounts a spiritual and emotional breakdown that he experienced in his late-thirties, after his literary success. That essay was criticized by some of his contemporaries for being too revealing, too candid, not becoming of a professional author, who ought to show some reticence and equanimity when it comes to his inner life. But over time, as mores changed, and Fitzgerald’s stature asserted itself and did not wane, the essay began to receive the recognition I think it deserves.

He of course was ahead of his time, in that respect.

The entry about him that can be found on Wikipedia includes the following statement: “The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that ‘I am myself the matter of my book’ was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent.”