Confetti

What does it mean to believe in something? I believe in the beauty of fins, the genius of the human hand, and that a walk in the mountains is restoring and sweetens the light of day.

I believe in the sanctity of the Sonoran desert toad. And dirt and eyebrows.

Is there a theme to this? Yes and no. Yes, there is a theme, but no, the theme isn’t pizza. Were you expecting garlic and diced pepperoni? This isn’t meatballs. This is yeast.

Texture is a literature for the hands. It involves capillaries and dots. Prepositions jump into the sentence and make it turn around and go under and sideways and arrive at the piano ready to play something theoretical and fragrant.

Consider the theme as a harness, a strip of leather reaching to the hindquarters of a mighty abstraction which has not yet been identified, other than resembling a horse, quite specifically a Percheron mare with a white blaze on her forehead and a personality big as Saskatchewan.

What is a thought exactly? Does anybody know? Heidegger had his ideas. They involved the meaning of Being, the fundamental ontology of existence, and to what extent the structure of language is involved with possible ways of being in the world.

If you look closely at a Viking ship you will immediately notice the magnitude of grace in the sweep of its lines. This might be used as an example of thought. Abstraction doesn’t always wear a veil of glass. Who can function without water? Does such a being exist?

I can walk through a wall of granite. Provided there is a hole.

The tempests on earth are growing in intensity. This is another thought, a shade of inquietude I call prediction. Two men talking about the imminent collapse of world civilizations under the shade of a live oak at an Econo Motel in Florida as the climate grows increasingly unstable and the seas begin to rise. 3.4 million chickens, 5,550 hogs drowned after the rains of hurricane Florence decimated North Carolina.

The lack of planning is breathtaking. Have people lost touch completely with the real?

Men gallantly battle the flames of a wildfire. The world is burning up. It doesn’t get more real than that. Floods, fires, famine.

What kind of species are we? It’s hard to break free of the Matrix. Hard to get to that place where the coyote stops and stares.

The engineering of the human body is amazing. The brain alone is a phenomenal organ. And yet 100 billion neurons are not enough to get livestock out of harms’ way. Do you not see the reality here? Memory harnessed to mist. Life in late capitalism. I use a zoom lens to ponder the chaos. The feeling of powerlessness is overwhelming. Oblivion parades over a problem until the problem disappears.

It doesn’t stop there. Look at the spiraling wind patterns on Earth Nullschool. The atmosphere is churning with our doom. I know that’s an extreme thing to say, but I wish it were otherwise. I wish I could say that tattoos and smartphones will save us.

I watched the typhoon Mangkhut crash through Hong Kong, blowing buildings down, cranes and scaffolding crashing to the streets below. We are sometimes pushed into viewing the grandeur of the void. Each person overflowing with theories while the obvious throws its confetti into the stars.