Anybody's Guess

You can’t see a pandemic or hear a pandemic but you know it’s there. People start disappearing. The sky grows quiet. Small groups walk the streets slowly, many of them now wearing masks, which makes everyone look like bandits, or ghosts. We’re the species that robbed the future of all its wealth. But that wasn’t real wealth. Real wealth is a capacity to enjoy things, even if you have to pay for them. The best stuff is, of course, free. If you can find it. When money becomes a deity the sublime gets buried in bullshit. New Age Silicon Valley billionaires dining on steak & lobster at Burning Man. Tent cities for the have nots. Teslas & tanning salons for the haves.

There sits my hat on a corner of the mirror, waiting for winter to end. It’s been a strange spring. Today I scrambled eggs & cleared my brain of thoughts about the future. That dismal abstraction. Which you can do anything with since, until it happens, it doesn’t exist. Molecules will show how that happens. Mass appears out of energy & dreams it’s a creek. Meanwhile, time tries to expand space by creating Texas. A religious feeling opens like a cabin. And this is what time looks like when it’s wedded to space in a handful of words anyone can open with their eyes.

Enemy number one is now the disease. It has a presence as solid as that of a quarter-inch Allen wrench. But you can’t see it. It’s invisible. And there’s no single Allen wrench. There’s a small collection of Allen wrenches sold in a package. I put everything back. And watch Brian Jones play the marimbas at the bottom of a swimming pool. In my mind, of course. Which happens to be a swimming pool. And then there’s Peter Green’s “Albatross.” That lovely, incomparable, rhythmic pulsing bass, like the slow graceful moves of the bird’s flight over Antarctic waters, dreamy, crepuscular. Big sun, blue sky, & rub Athena’s white furry belly as I try to read Proust.

There’s no such thing as destiny. We’re not special. We’re organisms that went astray. But what do I know? I know that the day ends when the sun puzzles the ground with definition & the tangential adjourns to dusk. I arrive at galaxies of stuff & float in thought & if I feel the urge to be honest with people I maneuver it back into its cage. What cage? We see dancing bears & a grocer named Pete. What does that tell you? Listen, I want to succeed for reasons that elude me, like morning when it spills into the room & sprints to the kitchen to gleam on a toaster. And then I wipe the refrigerator down with a moist paper towel & wonder what all these keys are for.

Disease is nature’s way of telling us that life on planet Earth is getting weird. The people of Earth have gone insane. They wrap everything in plastic, hoard toilet paper, & walk down the street with buds in their ears talking to invisible people. What can you do? I sit & listen to Charlie Musselwhite play the harmonica. When the rain comes it is long & aloof & the streets rise to greet it. Heaven is a library open all day & all night. Everything discharges an aura of worry until a combination of spirit & pizza placates the rustle of tinfoil. I endeavor to create a rebirth of everything. And that’s lunch, essentially, life enlarged by the constant threat of disease.

Mostly I just want out of this world. That’s all I think about now. It’s what you do when you’re old. You pretend you’re young & put words together. Why? Because the possibilities are endless. They can be transformative, but mostly they’re just cheap thrills. Extreme sports are for maniacs. But writing is for the truly mad. Ok, now that that’s cleared up, let’s talk about vibrations in the air, which is music, & gets a lot more positive attention. All arts require sacrifice. There’s no easy formula. But there’s something in the sound of a cello that removes the top of my head & lets all the language out. Why else would I perceive a different reality? That when I waked, I cried to dream again.

Meaning is something you have to make. This is done by thinking. Which is hard, like nothingness crawling over the horizon with another basket of feelings. Then there was that week in early August when Seattle had the worst air quality in the world due to the forest fires to the north in British-Columbia. The world has gone mad. You may go forth into the world equipped with ideas, which will fortify you against nothing, unless you’re expecting bad weather, & carry an umbrella, pelted by rain, which makes a funny rattling kind of sound, & drips from the edge, while the world goes on & on, until it doesn’t, & what happens then is anybody’s guess.