until evening reading Bolano, when drunk on red wine he steps into a depressingly bright California summer day - the sky was so blue it hurt, and the hotel pool right under his door was inundated by a bevy of bikinis - it should have been raining; there should have been portents of war in the air; smell of fear and vomit; not this bland American cheeriness; not this simulacrum of living.

"Shit! I shouldn't have started drinking soon after breakfast, skipping lunch", he thinks to himself, as he hobbles down the stairs, and through the lobby onto the street. Poetry. He must find some poetry to read. Which he does. And finds himself becoming less melancholic for an hour or so, re-reading a Robert Frost's poem, "Unharvested" (a lovely cousin of the more famous, "After Apple-picking"):

"A scent of ripeness from over a wall. And come to leave the routine road And look for what had made me stall, There sure enough was an apple tree That had eased itself of its summer load, And of all but its trivial foliage free, Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan. For there had been an apple fall As complete as the apple had given man. The ground was one circle of solid red. May something go always unharvested! May much stay out of our stated plan, Apples or something forgotten and left, So smelling their sweetness would be no theft"