I Live In The Real World Now

Prowling the depths is my failure, not yours. You're too hard on yourself. You should read Henry Miller. He makes poverty look like brandy. The ability to make yourself at home anywhere is a huge criterion. It all depends on how much one is willing to tolerate the wallpaper. I painted a scratch of it against a squiggle of wind and the tangible became emphatic. Musical, even, like love-in-the-mist. Sensations can be rampant, even in old age. Sometimes overwhelming. My left knee yearns for the feel of ermine. But the rest of my body is devoted to rain. I like the feel of it on bare skin. The saunas of Finland are a good place to start spanking yourself with a bundle of birch twigs. It stimulates blood circulation and releases a fresh birch aroma. My slap was meant to awaken your inner subversive. Again. I can’t stress this too much. Read Henry Miller.

Or Anselm Hollo. Now there’s a poet who knows how to bend an intentionality into things that are unintended, but wonderful, like hallucinations, or the northern lights. He knows how to sit and listen to someone while their eyes glitter. He knows how to turn on the lights in order to make it dark outside. He can address his friends while sleeping. He has all the markings of a poet. You can see them through two layers of glass at the far end of the restaurant, where he sits eating lasagna and whose head is a glob of light.

I live in the real world now, which is disenchanted and drab. I’m not staying here long. Just long enough to get a paycheck. As soon as I’m off work I enter another dimension. I enter the non-work dimension. Which is a streaming service brought to me by spiritual frequencies.

On the way home, I see a crow land on a high wire between a gibbous moon and a jet approaching Sea-Tac. I think it might be a sign. If I were a prophet I might be able to interpret it. Utter that one little word ‘if,’ and you raise the hypothetical into actionable being. How much does Schubert Sonata by Mark Di Suvero weigh? My car keys feel like extrusions of gray light. We all have an infinite pocket we visit with our fingers from time to time. I envision Joseph Cornell at a garage sale. He finds a snow globe containing a thyroid gland. My thesis swallows it and it oozes triiodothyronine. I can’t stop tragedies from happening, nobody can, but something has to be done about American history. It’s time to start my hiatus. There’s a chair over there and I may just sit in it. After I finish sanding the mind of a cranberry. And doing the dishes and taking out the garbage and gazing at the spectacle before me a ten-foot-tall clarinet summoning the angels with a sonata in e minor. I’m branching out. I’m putting down roots. I’m running to the indicative to stop the breakage of stems. I’m knitting a speckle with a Heckel bassoon.

The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and hot chocolate. One million earths could fit inside the sun. But try to put that in the overhead compartment. If we put consciousness in a box the result is often imprecise. Consciousness has a tendency to raise the dead. It can get a little edgy. It’s why I like to permit things. It gives me the illusion of control. I authorize the tin man to dance like Fred Astaire. And he does, bringing forth pandemonium negative space and winter. Everybody has to jump over an abyss at some point. I play Blueberry Hill on a peach harmonica. And a minute later I get a call from Mick Jagger. He will give a million dollars to never play the peach harmonica again. But I can’t help it. I can’t hold out. It’s got to be done. It’s got to be said. Life is weird among the dead. Sing the dead. All the way from Saturn. Which smells of amaretto.

It’s time to go home now. This is where the pedal meets the metal. Everything hurts like a gospel. King Kong breaks his chains and leaps from the stage. It was meant to be. Tear up Montmartre do what tear up time tear up space rip it up rip it all up. The poem never finds the right angry vapors to make the air feel stupid. And the clouds are mostly picnic areas and spoons. I fooled you world. I’m still listening to the Doors. Weird scenes in the gold mine. I wish I’d written that. Before AI gobbles it up. And spits it out in a university classroom. I’m lost. Lost in space. You can find it through wandering. Liberation. Salvation. Absolution. And then lose it again. And go looking for it again. In a different place. And a different time. And a different body. And a different set of circumstances. The light sweetens at the end, regardless of the tune. 

Running

I love running. I love the exhilaration of running, the elevation of mood, the euphoric charge of unfettered movement. Any time I find myself caught up in stressful speculations or dreary ruminations, running pulls me out of the muck and sets me back on solid ground. It takes my mind off the nonsense and puts me back in my body, where I belong. Sometimes it takes a mile, sometimes two, but gradually the mind-numbing miasmas of brooding and worry dissipate, and the invigorating immediacies of wind and cloud and sunlight and frost get my full attention. The space between my ears gains clarity. Relentless gloom turns rowdy.

I started running when I was 45. It was a complete surprise. I’d never been athletic. Not in grade school. Not in high school. Not on planet Earth. I spent my adolescence lounging and lollygagging whenever I could, reading books like Brave New World and Dharma Bums and Tropic of Cancer and getting high on rock and whiskey when time and luck and opportunity triangulated on the weekends. It was a long adolescence. I only recently felt its last little tremor quietly vanish in a bubbly, wistful poof. Age 45, middle age, was a renaissance. In 1986, after my second divorce, I went into a clinical depression. With the help of some meds and therapy I became quite friendly with Bacchus once again. Alcoholism is a darn sight better than depression, but its fatiguing, and saps your life energy. I have to hand it to Charles Bukowski. That guy had stamina. I quit drinking in 1990 and began attending AA meetings. I loved the AA meetings. I discovered how much I like to talk. Conversation is the next best thing to sex. And combined with sex, it is most certainly at the top of the hit parade.

Two years later, in 1992, I quit smoking. And that’s when the running began. I started out doing a couple of miles, then increased my distance to about six miles. I had a beautiful run that went from the crowded, narrow streets of Seattle’s Capitol Hill district up a gentle slope to the broad lawns and stately, 1890 ambiance of Volunteer Park down to the narrow road winding its way through the heavily wooded serenity of Interlaken, cross 23^rd street, segue into the arboretum, and loop around to home again. I was doing this at 5:00 in the morning, so it was quite serene, with no traffic, just me and the raccoons.

And now I’m 77. Still running, though the running has begun to feel a little more critical, a little more urgent, and a little more strenuous. I’ve learned how to avoid overuse injuries, which put frustrating holes in my running routine. I’ve always got a bit of runner’s knee – also known as patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) - is a chronic pain in and around the kneecap. I had it so bad once following a half-marathon that I was limping like Walter Brennan in The Real McCoys. Unfortunately, nobody younger than 70 will get that allusion. But maybe you can find it on YouTube. Crotchety Walter Brennan as Grandpa Amos McCloy grinning and limping into the TV screen. That was me limping down Mercer Street at the finish of the half-marathon. Crotchety old me dreaming of one day catching up to Mick Jagger.

The stubbornest overuse injury was peroneal tendonitis, an inflammation of the peroneal tendons, which run along the outside of the ankle and help stabilize the foot. I took eight weeks off from running and iced and massaged the afflicted area at the edge of my foot, but it persisted. I made an appointment with a podiatrist who X-rayed my foot and turned it from side to side and emphasized the importance of running shoes, and taking time off. I told him I’d been in the habit of running every day of the week. He suggested I start with a running schedule of two days on and one day off. Later, I can try running three days, two days off, or three days on, one day off. See how it goes. The important thing is to give your body time to recover. Damaged muscle tissue needs to be repaired. The cells need to disassemble old or damaged cell parts and use whatever is salvageable to create new cells. It’s called cellular recycling. There’s also mitosis, the generation of cells that are genetically identical to one another. He returned to the subject of running shoes and recommended two brands, which he scribbled on the back of a prescription form, which made it an official prescription, which I handed to the clerk at the shoe store, who went in the back and brought a pair of elegant ghosts (Ghost is a shoe brand) and invited me to try them on and do a little jog outside to get a feel of them. They felt fine, lighter and thinner than my regular shoes, which have good support, but don’t distribute weight properly. I’m not an expert on the engineering of the human foot – a subject that fascinates me – and neither am I a good judge of shoe engineering. But whatever the dynamic is, my new high end running shoes, my Ghosts, had a decidedly salubrious effect. My foot was feeling better within a week. I liked the new schedule, too. On my day off I began a dumbbell routine. I enjoy lifting dumbbells. I feel an affinity to them. The brand name is Ethos. Ethos dumbbells.

But it’s still running I love best. Outdoors with open sky and crows and robins and hummingbirds and sparrows and the geese down by Lake Union expands the mind. Mind and sky seem like the same thing. The same energy. The same mists and mountains of air.

Every time I commit to going for a run, I make it a point of pride to never change my mind and go back. There’s a joy in being a little Spartan. Intemperate weather can be invigorating. I’ve been hailed upon and snowed upon and poured upon. Today was different. It was cold—about 43 degrees—and pouring rain. March rain. That rain that’s been spurred by winter and whipped by the wind. It’s a mean rain. Inconsiderate. Downright sassy. Penetrates the skin. Kisses the bones.

A few weeks earlier, R - my wife - had been ravaged by an intense respiratory virus. She coughed nonstop for over a week. Watching her slowly get better was a great relief. We’re both getting on in years. I was afraid of contracting the same illness, which could be fatal. A few months previous to R’s illness, in late August, after passing a kidney stone, I caught a respiratory virus that sent my temperature soaring to 104 degrees. R stripped the covers and blankets off the bed and covered my naked body with towels soaked in icy water. This got my temperature down to a 101-degrees. It took at least two weeks to recover from that bug.

Running strengthens the immune system. But there’s a limit to that, and that limit becomes increasingly apparent with age. It’s a situation I liken to that moment late at night when a bar closes and the bartender turns the lights on and off, which shatters that pleasant state of Dionysian insouciance with the leaden inevitability of closing time. Always a bummer. Mortality sucks. Mortality is another kind of bar. No booze. No bartender. But the flus and broken bones and rashes and dimmed vision and diminished hearing of senescence are the lights of the bar turning on and off. It’s closing time. The problem is, I’m not ready to leave yet. Deep down, there’s a twinkling little light, a stirring, an agitation, a rebellious quickening of nerve. And there it is. My adolescence again.

R and I generally run together. We’ve been running together for 30 years. Lately, she’s had to take a break. On December 26^th, as we were running down the sidewalk running parallel to Mercer, she got distracted by some crows, tripped, and felt flat on her face, breaking a molar, scraping her chin and inflaming her facial muscles. She needed a dentist, tout de suite. Our normal dentist did not provide an emergency service. He suggested we go to the emergency room. But emergency rooms don’t have dentists. We called another dentist and got a message suggesting an emergency dentist in downtown Seattle. We called and were able to get in that same day. Several hours later, after some screaming, the dentist managed to get the molar out in five pieces, which he later showed me, describing how difficult it had been to remove. The good news was that she hadn’t broken any bones or injured any joints. The bad news was the number of weeks it took for the inflammation to go down. She took several months off from running and has started again running with me again. Somewhat gingerly at first, of course.

Sunday, March 16th. We go for a run. The air is crisp and invigorating. R is doing well. She's able to keep up with me, which makes me glad. Very glad. We've been enduring a lot of anxiety lately, due to the savage cuts that the president has been making on federal programs like Medicaid, and Medicare, and now even Social Security. We feel very precarious. Nothing in the public domain feels remotely under our control or influence. The country doesn't feel stable. A rug has been pulled out from under our feet. Running isn’t a panacea, but it does help you keep on your feet during times of unrest and volatility. It’s one of the few things over which we have choice and agency. And – unlike skiing or parasailing - it’s relatively inexpensive. The shoes can get a little pricey, but apart from that, all you need is the will, the time, and a pair of feet.

Wild And Weird And Hungry

This is trembling. This is climbing into you. A sentence. A thought. Purple damask by enkindling it with your eyes. Bright light in a drugstore. Grace crashes into a bundle of comic books. Cosmopolitan. Vanity Fair. Maire Claire. What a fashion is exhibited next to the tailor. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Naked iron percussion. Snow.

Let us now exceed the sniff of amazement and rise into ponderation. Charming behind stilts, the dynamic parody of shoes plunges into trigonometry. Animatron Ezra Pound shuffles forward. He offers to shake your hand. If you raise an embryonic comma, this will secure a pause in a sentence as yet unwritten. Words are compelling. They demand utterance, and writing, and megaphones. A magisterial bearing. A savage devotion. A deepening sense of fungus. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Jokes told in a hurry. I’m nailing my boil down as an impatient example of something I haven’t thought of yet. I’m waiting for the words to get here. Compliments wing the fiddle. It’s all about husbandry. And cabbage. The words are here now. Pulsing like a tortilla.

Opposites I flirt with growl their logic, and they become a song. What kind of whisper builds life with an indentation? Have you ever been stabbed by a woman’s eyes? All my responses to life have been like this lately. Nothingness bruises my syncopation with my own biology. Think of it as a nipple haunted by your own initiative. Hope hears the quixotic but not the chronology. Some men look like they could fix a sink. Others don’t. Heave this hammer against the milieu: if it hits a nail, the calliope will expand your clutch. Former inabilities will become billboards. Past associations will become banquets. Life provides us with a construction to carry. Some have wheels. Some have cuticles. See which gets there quicker. The bike with the pounding pistons, or the sad horns riding over the chatter.

My dismissal of orthogonal control forms the landscape. That little acreage I call my own here. This place of planting. This place of seeding. This place of revolt and metaphor. Various tumultuous symptoms indicate the presence of bias. I try hard to maintain some objectivity, the success of which largely depends on fiction, the kind of things one tells oneself when principles are at stake, and the pursuit of adventure unfurls in sumptuous Technicolor. William Burroughs sitting on a Kansas yard in a lawn chair. Hands clasped together. Musing. There was never a better time for resetting the clock and refining one’s sense of inertia. Redefining. Better way to put it. Circulate thought with exultation. Everybody loves a tidepool. Grasp something offshore and misty when the world grows hard and emphatic. Bring it home. Hose it down. Give it a name. Set it down gently on the landscape and watch it take off, wild and weird and hungry. 

 

A Sad Development: The Erosion Of Free Speech During A Time Of Crisis

Does it make sense to write poetry when the world has grown this delirious? When people are being arrested for protesting a genocide?

The erosion of free speech has been brutal. There’s now a big hole in the language and all sorts of demons are rushing out. Demons of fear. Demons of greed. Demons of isolation. Demons of secrecy and sectarian taboos. Demons of arbitrary destruction. Demons of oil. Blood diamond demons in luxury hotels. Demons of grime and Mammon. Demons of fraud. Demons of genocidal denial. Demons of linguistic sepsis. Organ failure. System failure. Heart failure.

It's a sad development. And we were warned. We were warned by books and movies. We were warned by the philosophers and scientists of the age.

They told us that war is stupid and vile and a racket for the rich. They told us that it takes courage to live and courage to die. That life and death are one and the same and that everything appears and disappears. That change is constant. That everything is in flux. That emperors come and emperors go. That it is better to hide ignorance, but difficult to do this over wine.

They told us the universe began as an extremely dense and hot point that rapidly expanded outwards, creating the universe we observe today, the roosters crowing at dawn on Kauai, the cry of seagulls over the waves of Puget Sound, the bulbous head of a harbor seal gazing at the stream of people on the walkway, the alignment of Mercury, Venus, and Mars in early March, viewed from the sidewalk in front of the 5 Spot Café, the James Webb Space Telescope finding a black hole in the galaxy CEERS 1019, which formed only 570 million years after the Big Bang, and is unusual because it's relatively small, weighing only 9 million times the mass of the sun. Ancient galaxies, supermassive black holes, and nebulae. Globular clusters. Stellar Streams. And life on earth with fields of lavender in Provence and old barns in Wyoming, bull sharks off the coast of Zambezi and spurts of afternoon rain on the sidewalks of Brooklyn. TV. YouTube videos. Nina Simone. Billie Holiday. Carl Sagan hosting Cosmos. All manifestations of the universe. The death of a warrior. The birth of a star.

We’re aware of the universe surrounding us. We’re aware of the universe within us. We’re aware that each of us is an issuance of the universe. Ergo, we’re the universe self-aware of itself as a universe. The universe studying the universe. Which is a stunning implication. Consciousness is an inherent property of the universe. Consciousness is me typing these words and consciousness is the sun squeezing hydrogen atoms to make heat and light. Consciousness is to speech what speech is to the heat and light of the mind, boundless within a sphere of bone.  

Quantum entanglement, where particles can be linked across vast distances, could explain how consciousness might be interconnected throughout the universe. Some scientists conjecture that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s seemingly infinite ability to find relationships between things, between ideas and concepts, between waves and wind and the distant chatter of background radiation, the residue of the Big Bang.

We are, emphatically, interconnected. Every tribe, nation, country, clan, progeny, dynasty, scion, house, society, lineage, language: interconnected. Every time someone kills someone part of that someone dies with their victim.

Language parallels the evolution of species, sudden spurts of linguistic speciation rather than steady accumulations of change, thus proving Kerouac’s bop prosody and the inherent capacity of words to leap into longer and wider trajectories, dilations of thought that follow the dilations of the universe, and lead to invention and engrossing amusements, the non-linear, quantum leap of the mind unfettered by dogma, by doctrine, by state propaganda. There’s a natural exhilaration in conversation that reveals the pulse at the core of things. The giddy pleasure of allowing one’s speculations to manifest and reveal themselves in a free flow of speech is itself wildly evidenced in the eruptions and expansions of the universe, of gravitational waves undulating with the fabric of spacetime as they propagate outwards, creating suns and planets and asteroids and moons.

So how does it happen that a language shuts down? That certain words be excluded from speech? That opposing narratives can get people detained at airports, or arrested and thrown into prison? You can’t stop a universe from being a universe. And you can’t stop the truth from being the truth by forbidding certain speech. The powerful are always fearful of losing their power. They maintain power by controlling narratives. Surrounding themselves with mythologies that conform with nothing in reality, but chain the mind and tongue to a false empire maintained by force. The universe goes on expanding. The universe doesn’t stop being a universe. It’s out there. And it’s in here. Here in these words. And the breath that gives them meaning and motion.

Welcome To My Daydream

I try to make my clothing as evocative as possible. It’s because the sunlight has an elsewhere in it. And nowhere else to go. Nothing jams a zipper like rust. In the old days, when the blackberries appeared on the vine, and a simple forelock could sustain a veranda, we did the mashed potato. This was before the furrows held water. I know differently now. I can nullify our assumptions with a piccolo. Go push a desk. I mouth hawks during chivalry. Sound is to glass what gas is to quandary. Another offspring due to femininity. Most of my feelings are auburn, and being somewhat of an expert on daydreaming, this isn’t the first wall I’ve walked into. What wall, one might well ask. There is no wall. And to that I say welcome, welcome to my daydream.

The depth it takes to hold a spoon is watery. It wanders through me like a sentence. I push, I accept, we adapt. The sentence readjusts. It becomes a celebration. The surrounding greenery signals its doctrine of chlorophyll. The pitcher in the middle fills with detail. Gorgeous from every angle, my thermostat is torn between absurdism and quantum entanglement. The room is never too hot or cold it’s always fissionable. The algebra there is always in upheaval. Picasso’s teasing asserts a giddy acceleration. It was the summer I climbed below gravity to find some curriculum. Wet with fascination, a chronology jaywalks across a wasteland in search of a worry. Paradise reflects the grass this thunders. We send all the cocoons we groom to Nineveh.

I scribble an impiety in grease next to the shop of improbable shapes. A woman comes out and tells me that faith is the fog of a long disquiet. I engorge with equilibrium. I tell her I’m waiting for a religion to materialize. This is the hunger walking around in me seeking solidarity. I skim a staircase during onions. And suddenly, out of nowhere, an olive appears. Clearly, garnishment sends its radar out to map our intentions. Everything hinges on accelerants. The next step I take will determine the course of my ascent. Either I shoot right up, or the sheen of my sweat will pack a mighty railroad. I'll know what to do when the time comes. I adjust my anonymity. I feel lucky. The epilogue remains speechless.

This much I know: I need to learn how to transform data into actionable insights. Otherwise, what’s the whole point of the mackerel? Let the mind exceed its ideas of scale and trigonometry to stimulate one’s improvisations. I shall continue my painting drop by drop until it perceives a loophole, allowing me to walk into a different performance. Meanwhile I’m going to stop all the candles until my adulthood arrives. There’s a cactus that awakens the climate. We won't need a wide-eyed vein antenna. But we will need a thought to dangle over the abyss of our flatulence. I will get some clay for my insistence on yardarms and spars. Something needs to be done. Every pulse adheres to a specific muscle. We pound our blood with foreboding. There’s a curve in our proposal that is silly with grouse. How much longer need I point to the sky? Don't bang a fingernail to spite the cat. It all works out in the end. 

Pixies In Pixels Garlic In Garamond

The olive tree is a stump to the river. I’m straining to understand the situation. There’s an abstraction beyond the construction of the eyes that fulminates like a landscape measured in quarks. It has those deep blues you find in the Proto-Renaissance of Italian art, those earthy tones of burnt Sienna and Venetian red, pigments like Terra Rosa and gold leaf halos. We come now to a hiatus in our amble, a massive furrow of fallow life, teeming with worms. The shovels lying around the grounds display a certain sagacity, a knowledge like grilled eggplant, and a drizzle of good olive oil. Perhaps this will help explain the reason I've chosen this moment to structure an apology for you, and why it's taking so long to get to the end of this sentence, which was originally intended to be a tiny wrinkle in the fabric of space and time, and has grown into this kingdom of garlic, in which aesthetic considerations trump economics, thereby causing butter.

I consider butter to be among some of my richest experiences on planet Earth. Everything tastes better with butter. And by everything I mean russet and rural and ruthlessly gurgled. Something like a sun. And a fence. And a day in the country, hunting cranberries. I think it’s high time we got to know one another. You’ve been coyly glancing aside at something peripheral all afternoon, something in the field of our vision that I haven’t written down yet. What is it? I’m not a mind reader. Unless, of course, the mind has rendered itself in an alphabet, a body of words streaming forth in the air, or flowing in stillness upon the paper of a page. Bobbing up and down. Or floating in a milieu of digital code. Fonts. Helvetica or Roboto. Pixels in a screen. Penguins on a shelf. Proteins in a proton. Polygamy in a porthole. Pixies in the meadow. Pixies in the forest. Pixies in the bathroom. Pixies on stage. Doing “Where Is My Mind?”

There’s a drama near us blinking plays. I think what's needed now is a boat propeller, something to move us forward in time. I’d like to get a closer look at the trellis in your blouse. If you could step forward and bow down a minute, the surrounding environment will make better sense, and things may evolve in different directions, mahogany in the rain, say, or a blue sweater abandoned by a river, and hanging from a branch of Amazonian cedar. I’m not the bombard I once thought I was. Just another rare species of clown with a brain in one hand and a cantaloupe in the other. Do people still carry notebooks? I do. But I’m weird. Always have been. Always will be. I'd rather be at the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end. That’s not a preference, that’s a commitment. My sense of belonging demands a casserole, at least. I want to hear that oven door opening. And all the way from the shores of Lake Geneva, and the Origin of the World, by Gustave Courbet, who knew a good brush when he saw one, and painted with the delicacy of a guest. 

The Gift Of Speech

I love this time of year. Winter loosens its grip and the air begins to warm. Everything hovers on a threshold of blossoming. Scientists caress their abstractions. Our inner gold aches and murmurs. It takes a sensitive pair of hands to fondle a conversation. The jokes are good and the punchlines accentuate our exultation. Reveries engulf the lyceum. We hear the lucidity of scruples warm the logic of soap. We hear things from very far away, tauntingly indefinable yet vaguely familiar. The sound of thunder on the surface of Venus is deliciously eerie. What does the other side of my life sound like? The rustle of a gown in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Madness in its apogee. Frank Zappa talking to Joan Rivers on the Tonight Show, 1986. Please don’t mock my children’s names. I urge a new rebellion against generalization. All else may be considered details.

The future? It's still too distant to know for sure. Is it an Oort cloud, or a contusion? The life I started 77 years ago is still hugely influenced by music. That doesn’t sound entirely convincing. Would it be more accurate to say that the life that started me 77 years ago was largely induced by hunger? Which never gets satisfied. Not completely. Some do better than others. You can see it in their apathy. We don’t have fur like other animals, or instincts or fangs. What we have is largely myrtle and folklore. Skin is quite sensitive and requires wool and gyration. It’s a defining moment. Everyone has their own cherished opinion regarding paddling a kayak. But one thing is universally accepted as true: music is a large thick bowl of consciousness. It's like sipping wine with your ears instead of your mouth. Melodies bend everything towards life, like Nina Simone, while a variety of rhythms shape our convulsions, like André Breton. The tongue fire has a pleasant taste. It wraps itself around our needs and gives us the gift of speech.

There is a hummingbird in the park that I have become very fond of. We communicate by telepathic confetti. It has 88 tentacles and a head the size of the Hagia Sophia. Maybe it’s not a hummingbird. Maybe it’s a mosque. Or a mosaic. Or a tiny pterodactyl reading Le Monde. The definition of things requires a compelling narrative, a wonderful inscrutability and a good imagination. I agree that what a conceptual idea of religion may alter may not be the final float in the enigma parade. We make gasoline as well as suture veins. There’s nothing one can’t do with a roll of string and a bag of parables. The first thing I look for when I come to town is a good barbershop. That’s where people get their news. Or scroll their phones. Looking for news. Ancestry and beach resorts. Or just sit around bleeding quietly to themselves.

Was there ever a Twilight Zone episode in which the main character discovers that everything they say has the power to produce actual physical results? Let’s call our friend X. So if X says to Z “take a hike,” Z goes on a hike. Or if X says to Y, “go stick your head up your ass,” Y attempts to insert his/her head up their ass. X has issues, it would seem. But say X proclaims “I wish neoliberal capitalism would die and a social democracy would take its place.” The next morning all the podcasts are chattering about the White House frantically restoring all the government agencies recently eviscerated (thoroughly reformed, of course, and fully staffed with highly efficient, deeply empathetic, altruistic experts and happy, competent workers) and subtracted a considerable amount of money from the Pentagon budget to give back to the population to help with inflation and infrastructure. And yes – oh yes! – free healthcare and college education for everyone. And no more homelessness, or war, or genocide. And so, engorged with power, X goes on a wild drunken spree. And in abject drunkenness and an irrepressible appetite for self-sabotage X starts sermonizing about how totally absurd everything is and stupid and meaningless and that’s when Rod Serling appears and smokes this sentence until it’s completely gone.