Can't You Hear My Egg Timer?

Why does my egg timer keep going off in the Stones’s “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” It’s an odd, insistent, inconsistent, jingly sound. I’m becoming like this. A cool pool that pulls on your eyes in a medicine cabinet. I have sometimes shredded a crucial anger, rather than put it to good use. Maybe that’s it. That’s why. Everything around me wants to explain itself. I don’t know why. I knew it as soon as light scattered over the bedspread that there were forces afoot, troubles dribbling calculus and calliopes responding with polymers. Meanwhile, the shapes and colors on the canvas are so unsettling the people have gathered, they’re reaping havoc, they’re doing the hully gully, they're singing an ancient new song, complimenting the propulsion, and squeezing the daylights out of every soufflé.

Once you see a reality, you can’t walk it back. The democratic morality is at it once again with a slogan, a few good adjectives, and a dead skunk. Sour sweet juices squeezed from a faulty cause and effect won’t quench the brushwork of a crazed calligrapher. This is an illiterate, anti-intellectual age, so I have to ask myself, why do I keep twisting my light into a corkscrew? What am I trying to open? What do I hope to achieve? Is this going to start a revolution? Why do I feel like Rip Van Winkle in a stolen Ferrari? By some apparent offkey anomaly, I manage to walk outside toward the emotions fossilized in the local real estate, and meander its many bones and mythologies. It was an ok empire while it lasted. And when it crashed we all felt strangely like a school of aberrations, pilgrims on a bender.

It's crucial to maintain the scenic beauty of one’s autonomy, not to tremble because of what harnesses you, but to deviate into sequins when the circumstances call for a hootenanny. There’s a lot of indigo beneath our words, but until everyone taps these consonants against the metal casing of their oscilloscope, it will remain in chaos. When science fails us, we must rely on swimming to find our inner Algeria. Our sugar is unofficially tough. But what about the clouds drifting around in life during a library? I have such books as I may mull to fill a universe with the lunatic grammar of its own absurdities, and the coolness of something with mint in it, or a pretty deferment. Absence is good because it restores the things that elephants like, such as space, and grass, and loose-fitting homogeneities. I’m all about underwear these days. I like the looseness of certain boxers, and a well-earned lassitude. I began, in old age, to rediscover the advantages, and some of the joy, in movement. And this new knowledge keeps much of our space outdoors, where it may touch the outer bounds of society, and the crack of morning in a dying conviction.

Logic is the cage in which we enshrine our cognitive jewelry. Dump logic, you’ve got something different. You’ve got dirt. There’s no limit to what a lyric can do spinning wildly around a marigold. I think consciousness is mostly paper. But that’s just me. I’m not here to preach, or sing, or rest my head on a table and drool. Talking is what each of us does while slowly chewing the air into tiny nuggets of sound. This, on the other hand, is a pale origami of folded air made reckless by a surplus of alibi. It isn’t propelled by incentive alone. Somewhere in the piano is a scenery cured by pulling on music with contrasting wires. We have to think differently of ourselves by folding our heritage into a conversation. I want you to think of this paragraph as your personal guide to a better delinquency, and so shake hands and part, believing in a better future, and the mutability of mousse.

When texture grabs an eggplant, it doesn’t mean umber, it means guzzle the moonlight. Seize the day. Sneeze the night. Suffer the fools. Squeeze the wind. Sizzle the fritters. Fritter the sizzlers. Nail the mail. Mail the nails. Walk backward into your childhood and bit by bit unlearn everything they pounded into your head. Color within the lines, salute the flag, work hard, obey your parents, trust the authorities and you will shine, because the U.S. is a stunning democracy and a prime example for other nations to the glorious achievements of a free society. This formula seems to work quite good for some people. Others seek elsewhere. The ancient ruins of Blonde on Blonde, Zen calligraphy, the prose and poetry of Charles Bukowski, miniature golf, moist umbrellas, the murmuration of starlings, or the improbable beauty of doorknobs. I sometimes find great solace in the ghostly ephemera of a garden hose. It is through solitude within the nothingness of pure being that the deployment of some inner sanctity builds its house under a waterfall, and forfeits the elegance of the harp for the eloquence of the ukulele.  

Who wins in the end? Our incongruities are often a triumph of hectic sensation. Public notices keep pouring in. Until I latch on, the feathers will not hold the sky in their hypothesis, because no one else does. Some days I can’t even watch Star Trek without some peculiarities obfuscating my gusto. Only on the basis of a total splatter can the variants of a new aesthetic be fully realized. Whatever a given aesthetics classifies as pleasing or painful carries an impulse to steal. If you drool your inattention within the device, and push it next to your denim, my candies will make more sense. I learned this one day in Brazil, substituting my foreignness with a sporadic behavior and framing each moment with bones. Every so often a new grammar exhilarates my fingers, and unravels a fresh commotion. Upheavals wander from sensation to sensation by a mechanism inside the teeming sand that is hard to identify without a fistful of nouns. But what nouns? This can only be answered by opening a dictionary, and crossing the river by feeling the stones.