My New Trick

My new trick for activating the crosswalk light at Queen Anne Avenue North & Highland Drive: press the button, get across to the other side, making sure not to touch my face with my thumb, then squeeze a little transparent blob of disinfectant gel onto my left hand, press my hands together & rub really good.  What the hell do you do when reality becomes too much to handle? When uncertainty is too all-encompassing? There was a time when alcohol did the trick. That was a long time ago. Different epoch. Different constitution. Now it’s Proust & Oreo cookies. Netflix. LSD: Long Distance Running. But none of these go deep enough. What I need is a rocket ship, a habitable exo-planet, & a nice long gulp from the fountain of youth. Herodotus is the first to mention a fountain of youth, which was in Ethiopia. The Ichthyophagi (literally “Fish-Eaters,” one of three tribes in ancient Babylonia), traveled to Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian king “led them to a fountain, wherein when they had washed, they found their flesh all glossy and sleek, as if they had bathed in oil, and a scent came from the spring like that of violets. The water was so weak, they said, that nothing would float in it, neither wood, nor any lighter substance, but all went to the bottom. If the account of this fountain be true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived.” It’s amazing how good I feel after a shower. Hydrotherapy. Cat on my lap preening herself stops to stare at the ceiling then goes back to preening herself, maneuvering her tongue & teeth between the interstices of her forepaw. Paganini must’ve had a phenomenal amount of energy & agility, the actions of the bow are so quick, so nimble, so eccentric it seems uncanny, supernatural. I see much the same magic in Stevie Ray Vaughn. Sound of the router, a mild electronic hum, I don’t notice at all at first, then, after it seeps into my consciousness, I can’t stop from hearing it. I search my mind for a memory, the last time I went to a drive-in movie. Was it the summer of 1967, A Man and A Woman? And aren’t memories like little movies that get stuck in our brains? So that a memory of a movie is a movie remembering a movie. I’ve never acted in anything. That must be strange, assume another identity, give it expression, motion, songs, ethics, caprices, creases, nieces, visas, thesis. I play a woolgatherer playing with a rubber band in a lonely saloon in Missoula. Wyatt Earp comes in sits down & shoves a photograph of Arthur Rimbaud at me. Do you know this man? Story tonight on the French news about a fire raging in the forests of Anglet, between Biarritz & Bayonne, a man’s house totally destroyed, the roof beams charred & still smoking, the only thing untouched – mysteriously - some packages of pasta. An interviewed woman uses the term SDF, which I look up: sans domicile fixe. Homeless. 30-ton humpback whale shoots out of the water near the coast of Rio de Janeiro, startling a group of canoeists. Sometimes I think I’m my own slingshot. I take careful aim at the void & then go spinning into the stars, a fist of beginning.