Peripatetic Ducks

The twang of a guitar gives us a brain full of music. One trigger triggers another trigger, as they say, and before you know it there is an oyster tickling your explanation for water. I float upstream and lie there staring at the ceiling. My intestines seem faraway, bunched in ooze and teasing Montmartre with a resurrection of lost saloons. The warp of a warm front twinkles over a crimson lake. It feels gold, like a moral, or a crack in the wall letting the sunlight through. The cardboard elegy is dipped in seven seas and given an anatomy of sidewalks and stilts. This makes everything words. I stumble through the apparel of my mind looking for something nice to wear. I need to murder a cloud at the aerodrome. We don’t need obscurity, we need flight. We need elevation. We need to combine wisdom with muscle and muscle with cartilage. It’s only proper to move around and dance to the music of the Beatles. The TV has thus modified its pixies and become a placenta of modern culture. Everything you need to know about Belgium is hiding inside a piano. The age whispered paper, but the bagpipes created animals of authentic fur and collar studs. A sexual fantasy scratched its genitalia with a tired enthusiasm. The garden, meanwhile, spit deliverance at a subpoenaed parakeet. A burned pickled named Dyl dropped by occasionally and told me stories about spurs and horses and the kind of anticipations that might arise in the middle of the prairie. I showed him my fingernails and he left in a huff. I took a bite of energy and bought an engagement ring for the planet Venus. This is what happens when a language broods in your indignation. All sorts of verbs come loose and become a tidepool of amusing nouns and peripatetic ducks.

Dread Ahead

I’m not ready for the future. I’m so used to electricity, running water, food procured easily at a grocery store, the ability to contact other people by phone or internet, that their lack is inconceivable. I’m spoiled. Beyond spoiled: I’m so tightly connected to this apparatus – what people like to call “the grid” – that I’m not even sure where my identity ends and the external world begins. I don’t feel separated from the world by my body, a unique, singular identity nicely enveloped in this soft, highly pliable organ called skin; I feel connected by my skin. I don’t feel a separation from the world at all. I feel very much a part of the world. But this conception is a luxury. It’s the product of leisure. Of freedom. Freedom from brute survival. I don’t need to hunt. I don’t need to seek or build a shelter. I’m part of a giant social network called civilization that takes what it needs from the environment and wraps it in plastic and puts it on a shelf in a store. And even that setup is disappearing. I’m now more apt to find what I need via a corporate colossus called Amazon. What would I be without this set-up? I’d be fucked.

If the grid were to collapse, I’d be lost. It’s not even a question of if; it’s a question of when. My mind races in circles and spirals searching for a plan, a strategy, a series of actions I can take to prepare for this horror. Should I buy a gun? A pistol for protection and to prevent our neighbors – crazed with hunger – from eating our cat? A rifle to kill squirrels? How do you prepare a squirrel for eating? What kind of stove can I buy that won’t require electricity? How many squirrels will be running around in a densely populated neighborhood of starving, disoriented people who – even on the best of days – evinced very little in the way of kindness or courtesy? Signs of the collapse are woefully present already. Every day I see people who appear hollowed out by a combination of technology and social isolation, zombies staring emptily at smartphones, people stewing with unmet needs and personal injuries in the lines at Starbucks.

Should I be buying canned goods? Fruit cocktail, bean and bacon soup, Dinty Moore beef stew? A solar charger? A prepper pack? Mayday survival bars? What about bathing? Illness? A nice private place to defecate without stepping in someone else’s deposits?

Will something in me heretofore unexpected suddenly emerge and turn me into a tough, enduring, self-reliant mountain man like Hugh Glass or Jedidiah Smith? Do I have capacities I don’t know about? I doubt it. I wore a coonskin cap in the 50s. I also earned some badges as a cub scout, but I forget what they were for. I vaguely remember making a radio with the help of my dad. That’s as close to self-reliance as I’ve come so far.

Most of the time, I sit and gaze into the void without a clue. Every time there’s a power outage we get some flashlights and candles out and wait patiently for the energy to return. The key word here is ‘patience.’ That’s the first and only implement in our survival kit thus far. The ability to wait for power to return. And enjoy a dinner of ham sandwiches by candlelight.

Depression, observed Rollo May, is the incapacity to construct a future. I can construct a future, but it’s a very bleak one. It strongly resembles what Cormac McCarthy mapped out in his novel The Road.

I envision horrific temperatures of cold and heat, massive hurricanes, ginormous tornadoes, respirable air and potable water sorely diminished, crop failure, famine, disease from the Paleolithic pathogens in the thawing tundra of the north, not to mention the diseases already afloat form the growing pandemic of homelessness and habit loss in the world, hordes of brain-devouring zombies attacking our door with hatchets and bloodthirsty determination.

Today, we still have electricity and running water and food to cook and eat. I’m typing this on a laptop which is connected to the rest of the world via Wi-Fi. And I’ve had a tough time adjusting to this world. I’m a writer writing at a time when fewer and fewer people are capable of reading and are far more inclined to play a video game anyway. They could be functionally illiterate and not give a damn. Try to sell a book in these circumstances. Ron Jonson made a tidy sum writing about porn. Do that. Write about porn.

Or don’t. Just saying. People don’t read for style. People read for content. Big tits and blow jobs. That’s where we’re at as a society now.

I don’t remember the last time I went camping. I think it was sometime in the 80s. I drank then. Maintaining a nice alcoholic buzz helped considerably when going a few days without a shower or running water. Some of the campgrounds had public bathrooms equipped with the basic amenities, a sink and a toilet and a mirror. I liked swigging beer and gazing at a mountain. A nice warm shower at a motel was just a few miles distant in time and geography. I could think about other things than hunting animals. I could think about Zen. I could think about my next beer.

A course in survival training might be helpful. But these classes are based on the functioning of a planet – planet Earth – as it has done for millions of years. Until now. The climates are different. Everything is different. Survival training will teach you how to catch insects and eat them. But there has been a dramatic decline in insect populations. I’m not sure crickets and ants and stinkbugs will still be on the menu. I suspect the menu of the future will include things like shoes and cannibalism.

Then there is the option put forward – albeit, of necessity, somewhat vaguely – by the writer Deb Ozarko, author of Beyond Hope: Letting Go of a World in Collapse. She has said that when the going becomes intolerable, she has a “graceful exit strategy.” I’m guessing morphine.

It’s comforting to think of that moment in the movie Gravity when Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) floating in endless space, his only chance of survival the parachute cord which Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) has caught with her foot, which is attached to what is left of the space station decimated by debris from a disintegrated Russian satellite, both of them clinging insecurely to the strand stretched to capacity, taut and delicate, both arriving at the sober conclusion that the survival of Ryan Stone will only have a chance of Kowalski lets go of her hand. Which he does. Calmly. Stoically. Gracefully. We watch as he floats away, receding into the infinite reaches of space to die in his spacesuit as Doctor Stone comes to the sobering, terrifying reality of being totally, utterly alone.

And then there’s that final, glorious scene at the end when Stone swims ashore from the lake in which her space capsule – Tiangong Shenzou (shenzou translates roughly as “divine vessel”) – has sunk to the bottom, and she crawls onto the sand and weakly manages to bring herself to stand, erect, under a gorgeous blue sky still streaked with the meteoric burn of disintegrating, falling spacecraft. This place called home, which is itself rapidly disintegrating. I hope, when the time comes, I can let go as calmly and stoically as Matt Kowalski.

Gray Morning

I gorge on wheat thins while gazing at the remaining liquid in the bottle of dishwashing soap. It’s a pretty color. I’m engrossed. Dreamy. High on marijuana. I wonder about things. Warblers. Disk harrows. Ponds. Is Schrödinger’s frog the same as Basho’s frog? Is one both leaping and about to leap? Can a person simultaneously be alive and dead? The Buddha once said: “Every morning I drink from my favorite teacup. I hold it in my hands and feel the warmth of the cup from the hot liquid it contains. I breathe in the aroma of my tea and enjoy my mornings in this way. But in my mind the teacup is already broken.”

The basis for reality is the circle. Context. Intertextuality. Conservation of the circle is the core dynamic in nature.

New day. I hear the crows cawing. It’s a still gray morning. Winter is retreating, leaving behind a patchwork of snow and ice. The streets are bare. The sidewalks are almost bare. There are still patches of snow and ice here and there.

Pyrotechnics are the rhetoric of donkeys.

There. I said it. And now we have a road on which to impose our impossible thoughts. Pull them like wagons. Push them like wool.

The lid on the Smucker’s strawberry jam jar is plaid like a tablecloth. I maneuver the remaining jelly at the bottom with a butterknife. It comes easily, goopily to the edge, and I maneuver it onto a slice of toast.

It's as if the universe were under my skin, and everything I did and saw and smelled and heard and lifted and touched were a continuous satori of enormous translucence. That said, where does this anguish come from? Is it sequential, like a TV series, or the neurotic intrigue of a woodcut? Is it idle worthless worrying, or something bubbling up from the unconscious, a muskrat or diphthong? Oil. Rain. A little brown cloud.

These things happen. It’s a big planet. Any distress can serve as the lungs of an equation that can’t be solved by self-indulgence or joviality. One can coax the mystery of yellow into fuller expression by affirming the fragrances of spring with an ancient melody. Animals swimming toward the shore. Miles Davis in Montreux.

Who we are might be predetermined, but there is nothing perfunctory about a paper towel. Great lengths have been taken to make it absorbent but tough. We defy time, but time doesn’t give a shit. Time is time. It slices space into nice little manageable bits. Act One, Scene One. Old friends are reunited. New triumphs are celebrated. Courage is found to face the dishes. A little circumlocution can go a long way. Remnants of mousse wash away into the dark. A rationale is found to ease the remorse for everything percolating in the italics of a whirlwind impetuosity. But who is the man in the black coat, and who is that woman with him? She looks like Maria Casares. And yes. The big plates go on the lower shelf.

Now you shall see everything will go very slowly. Time is flexible. You can bend it. You can make pretzels out of it. Time is what gives space its special character. This is a meditative business. This is why things go slow. The snow takes a long time to melt. Each day there’s a little less. Each day there’s a little more traction, a little more purchase on the surface. And the crows come swooping down in elegant resolution, sure of one thing: get that peanut. The ground has been covered in snow for a full week and there’s been little to eat.

When I think of suede, I think of violins. I have the greed of the novelist whose lecture is unseasonably bulky. Nevertheless, the story moves forward, modulating itself as the detonations thunder in the distance and the sights of Moscow begin to shape our philosophy of empire.

There’s a dragon knocking at the border. Three hundred miles to the south, a woman combs her hair in the basement of a book about tug boats. I’m trying hard not to harm her propeller by using too many words to describe it, but the cat has a shadow and the bureau has a silence that only an egg could offend. Trust me. I’m not here to oblige any algorithms. This is about lucidity, how it writes its own meat into existence and then wiggles around with a genetic irritation. I enjoy creating personalities for boxes. Their lids are always so unfettered. How can you not study molasses? I work every day to enhance the feeling of elephants. The river is slippery because it’s wet not because it’s indecipherable. Although, there’s that as well. I aim to bring about a state of verbal tourism. I’m a little weary, but I think I can make it work if you’re willing to pay some attention to the confusion. Ginger and rubies sleep in the plaster. The mushrooms approve of damask. The shawl is aromatic, but the digressions are shocking. It’s what we want. What we all want. The cold hard stare of the moon. A man playing a trumpet. Reality granted its final wish: the ghost of a pain gurgling the heart of a mockingbird. 

Gomek

Grammar is a phenomenon that the heart affirms with its rhythms. It comes ashore as foam and whispers cypress and palm. It retreats. It advances. There is systole and diastole. There is dreaming and wakefulness. I become a notebook filled with descriptions of the local park. My birth happens every minute. I feel the membrane of the universe connecting me to the stars that stir in my sleep. I see the flesh of giants in the melting of candle wax. I join a caravan and explore the world of silk and paleontology. Every theory needs repeating and arguing because there are so many different realities. It can be exhausting. But we all pack a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and Oreo cookies and go to work merrily as the winds buffet our clothes and the cliffs defy our embrace.

Give me some sauerkraut and a tap and I'll be happy. Marinate some crocodile meat in a mood of inconsolable weariness and I’ll be happier. Why? I don’t know. I like the word 'crocodile.' It rhymes with turnstile. Which rhymes with argyle. Which rhymes with reconcile. Which rhymes with tactile. I like anything tactile. A tactile turnstile reconciles argyle to versatile. And I like that. It’s symphonic and silhouetted and cud.

Gomek, a saltwater crocodile captured in Papua New Guinea in the 1950’s, grew to be 17.8 feet long and weighed 1,896 pounds. He was quite tame and people could approach him within one meter at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Anastasia, Florida. He died of a heart disease on March 6^th, 1997, and was believed to have been 80 years old.

I like crocodiles. Though, to be frank, I’ve never been close to one. We have a lot of developers in our neighborhood, but that’s a different kind of reptile. Much more destructive. They’ve become bloated with greed and corruption and vomit up luxurious apartment suites for the androids who work at Amazon.

The vigorous periphery of your embalming goes to the heart of things. But I have my lassitude to protect me from the tremors of ambition. The stems by the water provide theories of life that the vagueness of the fog welcomes with the chimerical hardware of commas and cashmere. These are simple things, but they’re the script I was given when I showed up for the audition. I was told to play a king, and so the words I uttered helped me to walk in the gold of redemption. I forgave when I could forgive and was forgiven when I forgave. Yet nothing felt as good as slapping the air with my sleep.

And I awoke feeling quadrilateral. A little disheveled, but fit for service. It’s true, there was a little meringue on my chin, but I could still play my role in the sensible world, and say sensible things, and do sensible things, while feeling nonsensical as birds.

So yes. There is a teleology, however undernourished it is at the moment. We can make improvements. I can walk on all fours and eat things. Shoes, furniture, people. Don’t come too close. Prose poems can be dangerous. They have large membranous wings and manifold ideals of steel. I can suit your temperament or pour you some wine. Your call. I just want to surface occasionally and eyeball the surroundings until some words appear and the entire mechanism rumbles about like egg whites on a journey of glossy superfluity. I can’t promise taffeta, but it’s a direction. 

Today's Forecast

The Pacific Northwest is expecting snow. Four to six inches. North to northeast winds increasing late tonight and gusts to 45 mph on Saturday. The wind will likely reduce visibility at times due to blowing snow, especially near shorelines of the inland waters. There will be some paradise remaining on Tuesday. This is because precipitation is a complex process, and paradise is a conceptual alloy of wildcats and wishful thinking. It’s difficult to simulate its exact value. But what I can do is make some coffee and wait.

The snow ignites waves as the stomach completes its hair. And this is considered, by Leibniz, to be too imprecise to be used as a foundation for calculus.

But ok for windows.

The hibiscus crashes through its birth and this is followed by a sweet mutation of feeling. Therefore, there will be storms of sausage on Wednesday and this will be followed by a warming trend. And when I ask you to be mine, you’re gonna say that you love me too.

We rinse some beautiful stems and move the furniture around. This achieves oil and colloquy. A mimosa engulfs itself in unlimited possibility. It makes me feel vintage, like an industry in the south of China. The bronze splash is whispering Beatles lyrics. It’s thoughtful lighting a snowball, but the plumber cannot sleep.

Still my guitar gently weeps. The tarpaulin bear walks across the table. Fat fingers fill a glass with chamomile. Coconuts and beans taste of detachment. I sit in the sand chair and dream of Moscow.

Nobody can say, precisely, what the weather is going to do. We worry about the commas of the cavern, the neglect toward our planet, and a warm sense of acceptance and resignation awakens. The elephant hammer is grimacing. It affirms our fiber, our tallow, our truths and feuds and scissors. We must learn to reconcile ourselves with uncertainty, with contingency and conjecture. There’s nothing in between except cheese.

I see the ooze of the foggy field and retreat from pertinence. The scorpion does a dance. My knees are radical as time. I’m falling through my heels. I capture diffusion by wrestling with everything I see and wondering if it’s simple or belladonna. I’m thoughtless as leaning a palm to my chin. I convey menus of sting and debonair.

The weather is changing. It’s always changing. That’s what weather does. It quivers in our juice with the thrill of impermanence and the mournful apprehensions of the foghorn. We study the heads with bright despair. There is a weather in our attitude, climates in our voices. Lightning is a giant spark of the brain. First comes gladness, and then comes rain.

Prepping For The Inevitable

I’m fascinated by distance

which is why I carry a knife

the time has come to act quickly

le souffle souffre de soufre

it’s always a great pleasure

to sit in a garage

listening to Bob Dylan

pull words out of his skull

and put them into music

which is how he came to receive

the Nobel prize. I feel very conflicted

on this subject. Language

doesn’t necessarily require music

to achieve its goals, but it helps

the history of sugar

is round and white, but it’s still

just sugar. We need a new mythology

the old ones have lost their traction

John Wayne wrestling an octopus

teaches us little about the octopus

the crisis of our current predicament

cries out for acceptance

I like the angularity of Cubism

objects do like the sun

which enters and exits the sky

it appears in experience

then disappears without ceasing

to be. There’s a lesson there

life, warmth, and compassion

are everything we need 

Here I Sit A Bunch Of Membranes

here I sit a bunch of membranes

in a reverie of tears

this is what it’s like to be trapped

in a room with your own mind

I grew up in Minnesota

and now I think of Walla Walla

and its rural atmosphere as a better

place than Seattle and its high tech

affluence and sociopathic behavior

oppositions lead to propositions

I’m not sure what that means

but it sounds good. The fork

is often associated with eating

and making tough decisions

this is the theatre of indecision

the sparkling of the wagon

is the mahogany of our incantation

I continue to have problems with jazz

but I’m improving. I feel the fingers

of a stellar, planetary music

play my brain

like a jar of honey

this happens a lot

the metaphors go crazy

trying to find a solution for ice

how to preserve it how to nurture it

I feel increasingly peremptory

but who wouldn’t in these circumstances

I hear someone calling me

and go buy a ticket

for the next flight to Mars 

Poem For A Dying World

What is grace? The spin

of a wasp, a locomotive

in the breath. Allow

yourself to be yourself

I hear someone vacuuming

the hallway and I dream

of Hamlet riding a motorcycle

across Arizona with a monkey

on his back. I like to create rhythms

for the dance of jelly

during the collapse

of industrial civilization

the truth is never simple

let me whisper in your ear

I need razors and Oreo cookies

there’s no morality in nature

it’s a dog eat dog world

with a little occasional hedonism

thrown in. I once lived in California

where I learned to photosynthesize

and enjoy wine. Music

drooled from the suburbs

and various rivers bumped into the ocean

an exit from experience

does not attest to the fate of what

comes out of experience

I banish all mass from this poem

homelessness has been normalized

and I’m sitting in a gas

of nitrogen and oxygen

while the glaciers melt and the seas

begin to rise and flood the cities

the slow drip of candle wax

attests to the beauty of understatement

I don’t think we’re going to ride this one out

hang on to your hat

Balance Sheet

what happens when capitalism

butts into reality

i.e. a finite world

that doesn’t allow infinite speculation

to occur. Money

goes out the window

each word has the heft of a gamble

as our supplies begin

to dwindle. This is not what I had in mind

when I was in my 20s and dreamed

the clacking of a spoon on a ceramic plate

after feeding the cat

God knows what. If that’s what radical

means then call me a radical

music is open to everything

which is why I keep falling in love

despite what appears to be

a horrifying future

of cannibalistic zombies

a woman in a dark mood

sits by a cash register

at La Grande Épicerie de Paris

following a homeless woman

in line dragging a urine

soaked blanket. Yes capitalism

is strange. It’s a pathology

nineteen agitated alligators in a ditch

electricity, running water, health

all cost money

and that’s what makes it

evil. Philosophy

swims in my head like a whale

call it phenomenology

or southern rock I don’t care

our immersion in life

shouldn’t require money

but it does. And for that

the oligarchy has arranged jobs

education and debt

peonage. Hurray

for pizza. I wish the super bowl

would go fuck itself 

Going Solar

does a poem write itself or is it constructed

out of clean white socks

all holes are holy

but the holes of socks

are wholly anthropocentric. Butterflies tie my shoes

while the sky walks around in my head

and yes, I believe in petunias

no one wants to hear heavy metal

this early in the morning. Am I

too old to write poetry?

the goal of a piano is create tigers

of sound, but that of poetry

is to propel words

through caverns of thought

and come out the other side

sticky, like peanut butter

as sidewalks bounce on my tongue

I take a romantic position

and put it into strains of refractory tuna

I’m fascinated by distance

who doesn’t occasionally need a little astronomy

age has little to do with the orbit of Mars

except as a form of parallax

in the great kingdoms of the sun

where I can smell the fresh odor of rain

after the storm has rolled its way further east

and the sun

spits its light into space

like a poem. Shelves everywhere loaded with books

it’s the gravity of the situation

here I am crawling toward you

will you accept

these words? I’m suffering

from an unbridled hedonism

although nothing is official until I put my shoes on

and sunlight comes out of my mouth 

Wedding Anniversary Power Outage Blues

It came very unexpectedly. It’s been a pretty mild winter. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to snow this year. The Midwest has been getting slammed by a murderous cold shoved down by a loopy jet stream, but the Pacific Northwest has been almost balmy, few temperatures lower than 45℉. But just to make sure it wouldn’t snow, I invested 45 dollars in a pair of Diamond Grip Yaktrax.

It didn’t work. I got up this morning to discover three or four inches of snow on the ground. Well, I thought, looks like I get to use those Yaktrax after all.

I got into my running clothes, filled a sandwich baggie with unsalted peanuts, and grabbed the new Yaktrax, which I proceeded to stretch over my shoe while sitting at the top of the hallway stairs. I realized I shouldn’t wear them walking over the shale tile of the entryway so I hopped to the door with one on and put the other one on outside. I wasn’t sure whether to put the pull-strap on at the back or at the front. I don’t think it matters. I put them on with the pull-strap at the front. I thought it might be easier to tug the rubber frame from the front than from the back. The studs looked pretty serious, almost like something from a video game where all the weaponry is exaggerated. You jiggle these things and they jingle. They could also be used as a musical instrument.

My crows were nowhere in sight. I whistled. No crows. I was disappointed and worried. I wondered how they were bearing up in this unusual cold.

         The cold was invigorating. I liked it. It made me feel all jazzed up, like cocaine, or Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Paradoxically, I found myself much more comfortable at 26℉ with low humidity than 40℉ with high humidity. 

I liked the sound of the crunch on the ice as my diamond grip studs came crashing down into it. The street was solid ice. A guy in a car honked at me from behind. I didn’t hear him. I got out of the way and he waved as he drove by. I marveled at the fact he was driving in such treacherous conditions.

There were a couple of crows at the end of Bigelow but none on West McGraw Place or further down by the Five Corners Hardware Store.

There were a few by the Queen Anne branch of the Seattle Public Library. They were definitely glad to see me. I had a lot of peanuts to toss and it felt good to get them out there and hear them click on the ice of the street. If I threw them into the snow they tended to disappear. There were hardly any cars around.

I glanced at the tent set up in the most discreet part of Bhy Kracke Park, under some shrubbery in the midsection where the switch back trail winds around under some tree branches. I didn’t see anyone, didn’t hear anyone. The tent was blanketed in snow although somewhat protected by the shrubbery. If there was anyone inside, they must be freezing, however many blankets they’ve got. I still don’t know who – or if anyone – has been living in that tent. It has been there for several weeks now and although I pass it twice a day I’ve seen absolutely no one.

I got home to discover everything was dark. We’d had a power outage. I pulled the Yaktrax off of my shoes and hung them on the doorknob of the hallway storage closet. Then I came in and got undressed while R phoned Seattle City Light to see if there was any information about the power outage. The messaging service said energy would return at about 6:00 p.m. R managed to fish a battery-powered dome light out of the cupboard to use in the bathroom while I showered. Showering is a dangerous enterprise in the dark. The little dome light came in very handy. Our big red flashlight wouldn’t work. The battery had expired.

We thought about going to one of several restaurants for dinner that were within walking distance, but their power was also out and we didn’t know for sure when it would be returning. And the two restaurants don’t begin serving dinner until five. We couldn’t wait that long. So R made a couple of ham sandwiches with avocados and mustard, lit some candles to put on the dining room table, poured herself some wine while I opened a bottle of sparking water and we celebrated our wedding anniversary in the dim, ambient light of three burning candles.

Our ham sandwich dinner was followed by two servings of tiramisu, which I’d purchased the day before. It was delicious. The richness of all that layering was a diffusion of gustatory pleasure so unashamedly lush as to border on the metaphysical.

Afterward, I put on an LED headlamp and read Ezra Pound’s Cantos while R covered herself in a blanket and read The Sun Also Rises.

The power came back on about an hour later, much earlier than expected, and the return to the normalcy of heat and light and running water made me feel almost ashamed at the tremendous cost of bringing it here, making it available for so many people. Everyone, for a time. Not it’s not everyone. And it’s not as flawless as it was a few years ago. But for the time it’s here, I’m not taking it for granted. I never really have. Except on nearly every occasion when I go searching for a light switch. It’s the first thing I do. It’s automatic as breathing. Even during an outage, my hand goes immediately in search of a lamp or a switch, and when nothing happens, it’s a strange feeling. Like that jolt I get every time I go for a trip in the country and look up and see all those stars. It’s shocking. It’s the shock of awareness. Beauty, indifference, vastness, it’s all there, nakedly gleaming in all that black. Every time that curtain of habit gets pulled back a real look at the universe can make you tremble with awe.

Admiration

There are many ways to admire things. I admire computers, but I don’t like them. Don’t like what they’ve done. I admire many of the accomplishments of human beings, but I don’t like human beings. Don’t like what they’ve done. Don’t like what they do. I like some of the things they’ve done. I like running water and electricity. But I don’t like waste and war and fracking and hacking and greed and autocracy. I don’t like deceit. I like jelly beans but I don’t admire them. I admire wire. I admire fire. But I’m not a fan of wire. I’m a fan of fire but not of wire. I admire wire. I appreciate wire. Wire allows voices to come out of my radio. Wire allows light to come out of our lamps. I prize wire. I respect wire. But I don’t adore wire. Infatuation and wire do not, necessarily, conjoin. And this is why I admire fire but I don’t go crazy for fire. I savor the warmth of a fire. I value fire but I don’t embrace fire. I admire adhesion, adherence, and umbrellas. I admire toothpicks and teeth and tongues and tungsten. But I don’t worship tongues or teeth or umbrellas or toothpicks. I appreciate these things. I value these things. But I don’t necessarily love these things. Love is a strong word. Admire is a sensible word. But let’s not get carried away. I like getting carried away but let’s not get carried away today. Let’s admire the day. Let’s admire the day and its random occurrences and delights and dents and berries and surges and choices and perplexities and contradictions and powders. I admire them. Let’s admire them. Let’s admire these things while we can. Let’s play guitars and sing. Let’s admire the momentum of the mongoose. Let’s admire mohair and mesas and refrigeration. Fingers hammers driveways highways byways and prunes. Caribou fortitude opals labels staples jonquils jewels fossils cymbals bevels buckles candles cradles councils mountains and the wind over the dunes.