Dear Reader

Dear Reader: are you still there? I'm here, minding my own business in obscurity, packing my suitcase and humming Inagaddadavida. Maps, underwear, attire, hot air balloon, and Pataphysical Snorkel Kit. I’m braced. Firmly ensconced in the never-ending challenge of hotel faucets. The glitter of audacity. The smell of the Mississippi in Mississippi during a sunset in Tupelo. There are things I can’t explain. What has become of the role of the writer in a world of AI? Am I a ghost? Is there any reality to what I’m saying? No ideas but in things, quipped William Carlos Williams. Opium and denim. Earthworms and pillows. I get it. But what happens when things turn spectral? Consciousness is fluid. Sometimes words mean different things. You’ve got to keep an eye on them. Ideas are the ghosts of thought, raked from the infernos of divination. The Oracle at Delphi breathing in the fumes of the underworld. Words eat the air. They drink the light of the sun and detach and die. They flutter with the tumult of the mind. They decompose in piles of raked leaves and cut grass, producing heat. And this becomes a haunting.

There are plenty of things in life to care about. Périgord truffles. Petrarchan sonnets. Feral cats. Reading is a way to remember. Wherever I go there are more things to absorb, more things to learn, and more things to pay attention to. The slosh in the toilet when the Space Needle swayed during the earthquake of 1965 when I was in health class learning about human sexuality and drugs. The high school was an old brick building. It shook like a stripper at the Peppermint Hippo in Las Vegas. The teacher clung to the blackboard. Now I’m an old man and sit in a chair gluing words together with folklore and bile. I’m surrounded on all sides by galaxies and asteroids. Carl Sagan’s wallpaper. The odysseys of objects in a woman’s purse. The worrisome debts in wallets. The weirdness of purple. The bump in the road. The charge of an elephant. The talk in the backseat. The differences between elevators and escalators. The convoluted blobs of oysters. The voices of old men in the night. Hard to say these days, what’s real, what’s not real, and what’s in between. Certainty is a rare feeling. Those who claim its patent are either hopelessly imperious or totally insane. The truest certainty is uncertainty. It’s not a moral. It’s not a trick. It’s just uncertainty. One more thing to care about. One more thing to read. Decipher. Drink from its spring. 

Books are repositories of boiling, oceanic consciousness. Did you know you can make a waterfall with a megaphone and a little urine? It’s true. Beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, squirming in the backseat to juggle two planets in a dance of prose. Don’t treat yourself like a prison warden. No, no, no. Try to imagine yourself as Elwood P. Dowd. Or Harvey, his invisible a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch tall white rabbit. Words can’t do everything. Not when infinity detonates in our eyes as we attempt to drag a large vocabulary of Hindi through the flowering vines of India. You’ll need a deep understanding of prepositions, and a map of Manipur. In the end, there is no end. Each end begins another beginning and each beginning slows before the next detour, the next exit, the next last chance, the next hothouse romance, the next smell of sawdust, the next play, the next crisis, the next fight in the ring, the next appliance, the next sweater. The weird motels of blue highways, the face on the back of a spoon, the incursions on your time, the escape into cinema, the push to go somewhere, always, until the journey itself becomes the destination. Fresh rain. The sway of willows. Fingers on a wall of frosted glass.

Red soil is a good indicator of iron. Color, texture, and the presence of certain minerals can indicate past climates, including temperature, barbecues, igloos, and rainfall patterns. If you can read whatever terrain for signs of potential wealth, or water, or oil, or old coins and the remains of ancestral dwellings, then Mars is the place for you. Or the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. My reading of dirt concentrates on pleasure, how good it would feel to sink my fingers into some black topsoil and smell it. Smelling is the power to read the air for signs of brushfire or frost. Texture, too, is a form of text. My sweater feels like Proust. My pants are vintage Kerouac. Legibility is all things and all things are legible. The illegible is legible when it provides clues about our headstones. Cemeteries are libraries of the dead. Hills are compilations of rocks and grass. Mountains are anthologies of mines and summits. Our carpet is encyclopedic. Our kitchen drawer is poetry. The knives are eloquent. The forks are ambivalent. The spoons are spondees of splendid inattention. Everything rattles in chorus. Everything points to syntax. Everything needs a predicate. And a name. This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair.