Gnarly Buttons

We have a stuffed Viking in our kitchen. He hangs from a hook on the wall. I don’t know where he came from. I don’t know why I am just now noticing his presence.

I notice he has a sword. And a mustache. I hear a nearby ocean. I hear the men outside, power-washing the awning.

What does Mammon mean in the Bible? How many babies do you have?

The umbrella doesn’t need you. The umbrella is its own door.

I frequently have migraines and dizzy spells. We are sometimes bewildered by the evident simplicity of water. Reality is a context, not a princess. Blake’s tiger moves stealthily forward. I anticipate the rumble of a foreign sky. And the total solar eclipse in Oregon was followed by wildfires, zombie chickens, and a monster traffic jam.

I study the structure of reticence. Reticence sucks. Hitchhiking is best served by patience, though I would not recommend it as a mode of transport. These are strange days. The world has turned apocalyptic. You never know, when you pull that door open, who’s going to be at the wheel.

There is a certain politeness to pain, don’t you think? Its courtesies are meant for the well-being of the organism, though it’s easy to think otherwise.

My heart is a stone lined with crystal. The chuff and whine of construction trucks can be heard nearby. When I consider the facts external to my existence, I wonder “how is it possible that I’m still here?”

Referral to the Other is the indispensable condition for the constitution of a world. A creaking staircase, La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the affable flavor of wine.

Time works by gear and tablespoon. The airplane is a meditation in flight. The delicacies are parenthetical. You can have as many cucumbers as you like. But remember: the world as it is revealed to consciousness is inter-monadic.

What does that mean? It means that a transitive verb walks into a sentence and sits down on a noun. Eventually, the words begin working, and the noun is pushed into big bowls of thought.

What is it like being Paul McCartney? Sir Paul sits behind Barack and Michelle Obama. He glances at Oprah Winfrey to his right. When Sartre talks about Being, I don’t think this is what he means. This is something different. It’s not nothingness, and it’s not a transcending connection with which I bear some relation. I don’t think it’s meant to be plugged into anything. I think it’s simply a man who writes songs enjoying his wealth.

Is there anything more lonesome than an empty floor at Sears? All those appliances, all those clothes. Nobody shopping. Nobody pondering. What happened?

These are the shipwrecks of a single breath. I am dreaming jelly in the pleasure of my solitude.

I drop my keys. They hit my toes, then plop on the floor. I crawl into the music of a harp and daydream. The search for understanding concludes with a foghorn.

I am not my name. I am my bones and eyes. I fold the sky into a clarinet and play “Gnarly Buttons.”