Sweet Spot

5:55 p.m. It’s June, 60℉ and cloudy. I’ve just been reading Proust, who – on a wintry Parisian night in late fall thick with fog – has just negotiated the revolving door of a crowded restaurant. He is treated rudely and given a seat by the door reserved for Jews, where he gets a cold draft each time someone enters or exits. I’m reminded of all my misadventures with revolving doors. I can never get myself in sync with the rhythm of the door. Instead of trying for a graceful entry, I just leap in and exit as soon as the door is exposed to the interior. I haven’t had to do that in a long time because so many department stores and shops closed after the pandemic. The commerce of the world seems to be happening in higher places now, places out of reach financially, morally, and militarily. Like that movie Elysium, with Matt Damon, who gets fried in a radiation chamber, becomes a cyborg and leads a rebellion against the elites in outer space.

Granting ideas by grammatical resilience is the essence of what I do. There’s nothing approximate about it. It’s the whole tamale. Think of these words as hanging behind the oak I have created to grow beside me shooting out branches and leaves. Under the orchard, there are screams on the circumference of a wobbly expression, most of it roots and dirt. Here is where things get messy. Make the paraphernalia fall towards the sink by the very smell of it. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. And you must remember this: a kiss is just a kiss, but a stalactite is unintentionally disgraceful. Don’t blame the makeup, blame the minerals. This kind of dripping from above reveals the dialect of the depositions to be correspondent to our singing.  

On the way home from a short run along the Seattle waterfront we stopped on the old Seattle World’s Fair grounds to watch a magician. He was surrounded by a group of people. He was quite good. He had an engaging patter that held everyone’s attention and his tricks were skillfully rendered. He folded the six of clubs into a tiny square and made it disappear. He revealed all the places the card had bounced and ricocheted: off a tree over there, a bench over there, the wall of the nearby Seattle Armory and pointed to a man in the crowd and said it ended up in his pocket. The man went to look and the magician joked it didn’t stay there it flew off. It was a funny joke but I couldn’t help think how cool that would’ve been if the six of clubs had been in that man’s pocket. The magician began explaining another trick he was going to do and pulled a lemon from a small black bag someone in the crowd had tossed to him and began retching and opened his mouth and out slid a butterknife, with which he sliced the lemon, and out came the six of clubs.

The conjecture of absentia by absinthe proposes a table upon which to dilate into a sphere and rise to the ceiling. This is not how most things begin, but this is how this begins. Two lines that intersect are called parallel. Two lines that form a nerve in the morning spill life into congruent faces. If the world is a domain of nouns and adjectives, then why does the probability of a chance event depend on description? Shouldn’t it be a matter of perspective, of finding the crucial undergarments? Things in geometry have boundaries and angles. Things in language have aviaries and clowns. Once in space, parts of the situation will seem to undulate, like coitus in orbit around a tattoo. It’s at this point that we discover the true meaning of sweet spot, and give it all we’ve got. Meanwhile, on earth, the sepia bride TikTok drama continues, and anxiety and ice. So let’s stay up here, where consciousness flows, and words chatter in naked spontaneity.