God's Spies

Who was it said writers are God’s spies? God being the corporation of the sky. Which manufactures clouds and dreams. And floats in people’s hearts like a slingshot. Full of stipends. These may be stipulated or stippled, like stilettos, or storms. But spies, yes. It was King Lear, talking to Cordelia: “No, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison. / We two alone will sing like birds I’ th cage. / When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At the gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too – Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out – / And take upon ‘s the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out, / In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by th’ moon.”

Spies are skilled at observing things without drawing attention. They do it by blending in. They do it without letting on that they’re observing. Catching details. The quality and size of a sheet of paper, its thickness and texture, its fiber, its submission to the flow of a pen.

The tonsil, too, is a tool. And the tongue is utter poker. Menus are the chronicles of the food and predilection of our time. But the jukebox is rare, and hides in a corner, where the hits sleep in vinyl, until they’re awakened by a needle sliding through their grooves. Well, it’s been building up inside of me for oh I don’t know how long. I don’t know why, but I keep thinking, something is bound go wrong. Because it always does. Shit happens. So why worry about it? Worry, I’ve heard said, is like trying to solve a math problem by chewing gum. And the hits keep coming. I stuffed that monster with quarters. Teenage angst. Adult angst. And the angst of old babies, that nurse their worries in gin, and rock their equations on stools, and stare longingly at the mirror.

Gunslinger in a golden vest playing an electric guitar like it was the vagina of space.

Let’s all try to learn a few things and pick each other up when we’re down and not ever push nobody down because we’re up.

Stevie Ray Vaughn, October 3, 1954 – August 27, 1990.

What was I doing on August 27, 1990? It was a Monday, so I was probably feeling a bit glum about returning to work. Though admittedly, and to a small but discernible degree, I enjoyed that short wait at the bus stop by Jimmy Woo’s Pagoda on Capitol Hill, leaning against a brick retaining wall, amenable to the moment, mulling whatever happened to be fomenting in my mind. It was a pretty neighborhood, before the developers got there, and destroyed its charm with unaffordable apartment buildings with hard right angles and bland façades void of aesthetic play. That was an odd interlude in my life. It also involved going to a coffeehouse called The Last Exit, which was on Brooklyn, and had tables of marble slabs, which had once been stall dividers in the old King County Courthouse. There were always chess games going, hands bonking timers, and conversations by which you could obtain an education if you listened in casually. I’d read a little Kerouac, or Proust, or Celine, then trudge to work. The whole sequence functioned as an airlock, giving me time to ready my resolve, noodle my poodle, open the door, and do time. 

It takes time to kill time. So don’t kill all of it. Leave some for the time being.

Sometimes an artificial emotion is better than no emotion at all. Wear a plume and become a multitude. Gratitude goes where the current is swift and the bottom glares back in specks of gold.

When in Australia, out in the bush, be sure to clap your hands to scare off the spring snakes.

That’s the best advice I can give to the youth of today. That, and these lines from Rosie and the Originals: It’s just like heaven being here with you.

I will arise and go now, and go to the kitchen, to feed the cat, and visit the bathroom on the way back. There’s a towel there I’d like you to meet, I say to my hands, which are eager hands, eager to grasp, eager to touch, eager to fold and to be folded, like the shadows at noon, which are folded into shrubbery and disappear behind the barn, only to reappear a few minutes later, holding a genera of stem succulents, like the euphorbias of the desert, fixing CO2 almost exclusively at night, and trading it in on a horse & a carriage. I commend them for their bravery, for their nimbleness, and for their dexterity, which is a pretext for squeezing your pretzel, and stealing your watch. Legerdemain, man. It stole my city. And won my hand in marriage.