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The dermatofibrosarcoma of Darier Ferrand is one of the million and one goombas that seem to lurk about in the world, just waiting to fuck with us. According to one french entry about it, the sarcoma evolves “indolently”. That was certainly true about mine. In return, my response to the thing evolved indolently too, until last year I finally saw a dermatologist in Santa Monica and had him do a biopsy of this welt like thing on my thigh. The biopsy came back with the conclusion that the lab hadn’t had enough material to make a definitive identification. Two weeks ago, I went to a French doctor who, without much ado, took a much bigger chunk of my thigh and sent it to the laboratory, where they ID’ed it. And so it was that I was advised by a surgeon that it was the kind of thing which, though benign, would produce troubles for me later on. His advise was to take it out. Yesterday morning, A. and I advanced to the Clinique St. Jean, which is just around the corner here in Montpellier.

I’ve been extremely and disgustingly idle this vacation. I blame the heat. I blame old age, the slowing down of my cerebral processes, and George W. Bush – because anything bad that happens in the world has to be blamed on George W. Bush. That’s my philosophy and I’m stickin’ with it. However, my brain ain’t so slow that I’m going to take “idleness” as a self-evident description. It strikes me, at least, that this idleness is connected with simultaneity, the temporal mode that characterizes modernity. Simultaneity is of industrial manufacture – it was produced as an effect of the steam driven printing press, the railroad, and the system of manufacture that came about in the nineteenth century, which has resulted in the fact that you can get strawberries all the year round in your local grocery store and that you can, if you want, breathlessly follow the crisis in Greece on computer and tv screens in ‘real time”. Idleness is falling out of the zone of the simultaneousness. Well,