The Fall

 

Kangaroos

                “I drew an octopus cause it has eight legs and they all swim like this – whoosh!”  Billy shot out his arms and blew bubbles, his dungarees rose toward his belly button.

                “Ahh hahaha,” Joe grinned and giggled.  “I drew a penguin.”  He picked up his penguin and held it out with both hands.  Rosy cheek smile end to end.

                “You want a candy?”

                Joe’s eyes widened.  “Whacha got?”

                Billy reached in his pocket and palmed a piece of chocolate, unwrapped and really good-looking.

                “Whoa!  Where’d ya get that?”

                “My mom gave it to me before I got here cause my sister is sick and she wanted candy and my mom went to Super Fresh and got it and gave it to me.”

                Joe started giggling, then Billy started too.  “Toss it to me,” Joe said, taking a couple steps back.

                Billy tossed it - his arc a little too high, the chocolate hit the ground.  “Hurry up and grab it!”

                Joe scrambled to the ground and tried to grab the chocolate.  It slid from his fingers as he tried to scoop the sides.

                “Five second rule!”

                He tried again, but the chocolate slid away.  He grabbed it next try and stood up, outstretching his arm and staring at the chocolate.

                Billy shook his head.  “I think that was more than five seconds.”

                “It’s ten second rule!  I got ten seconds to grab it.”

                “Isn’t it five second rule?”

                “No, it’s ten second rule.”  Joe bended his arm in and looked at the chocolate up close.  “My sister dropped a pretzel on the ground and then she ate it cause she said it was ten seconds and that was fine because of the ten second rule.”

                “Oh, ok.” Billy giggled.  “You wanna draw a kangaroo with me?”

                “Yeah I love kangaroos.”

                “Kangaroos are my favorite animal.  So are frogs.”

               

                  

Good Posture

I'm the most interesting person I know.  I don't mean that in a snobby way, exactly.  I just have clearer access to my thoughts than anyone else's.  My mind is manifest, all others are separated by various degrees of opacity.  I'm sure Eytan has a running mentalese narrative in his head throughout the day, but most of the time I don't know if he's solving the problem or beating up halos.  Occasionally he'll say something reflective, but my eyes aren't always in sync with the air waves exuding the meaning in question.  And later I'm leaving the most interesting person I know.  I have clearer access to my thoughts.  The mentalese narrative in my head, I don't know, most of the time.  Something reflecting, the most interesting person I know.  And later I'm leaving the most interesting person I know.  Mentalese, reflecting, leaving.  Interesting.

New Orleans, August

What would it be like to be colorblind and have synesthesia?

Tally marks are different in China.

I wish “tl;dr” was more-widely used – like, at the end of at textbook chapter.

A random binary number generator costs exactly one cent.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

New York City, July

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

Bertrand Russell

“Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.”

Slackers, Richard Linklater

Havre de Grace, June

Maybe the big corporations are anonymously donating large sums of money to charitable causes, but don’t want to receive credit because of their humility.

You don’t need money to make it out of the hood.  That is, if you don’t mind being homeless.

Most real numbers are transcendental.

In the U.S., 82% of Catholics think that birth control is morally acceptable.

Reflections (Fade)

My whole life listening to music
And now, the sounds drowned in silence.
I can hear my heart - it's always been there, beating
but I never noticed it til just now.

My whole life is a mirror,
I'm nothing more than me.
Writing poetry by myself, about myself
Listening to music and schoolchildren on friday afternoons.
Thinking,
laughing occasionally,
Remembering to bring my car keys before you close the door.

My whole life will end
like light as it approaches and is swallowed by
a black hole - insipid, uncaring
as a young couple making love,
a door ajar, a baby rests in the crib.

Oh, Inverted World never gets old.

Gasoline Hands: A Meditation

            Inhale, exhale.

Twisting patterns of poetry illusively decorated the room, augmenting its form into perpendicular space.  Colors unseen, shifting spots with ideas unthought.  Unsure of where I stood, or where I was standing, I sat; soon found space beneath the patterns for personal poetry.  My words were meshed into sounds of the atmosphere, lexical menagerie to send me away.  Living wisps of wonder and the totality of what is.  The doorbell rang.

                “Hi, sir, how are you doing today?”  Short legs, long hair.  Her pleated skirt had probably been ironed earlier in the day.  What time was it anyway?  Her nervous smile met mine.

                I thought about her question, really tried to take it in.  “Well, I’m a little confused.  I had a thought sitting in my head and when you rang the doorbell, it just disappeared.”

                “Ooh, that’s a bummer.  I’m really sorry about that.”

                “No, I mean, it’s not your fault.  It’s not like you rang the doorbell just so I would forget what I was –“

                Thinking.  Thoughts, default value, like the null hypothesis of an experiment.  Avant-garde Andy Warhol free word association.  The ghost of Jimi Hendrix lives in my shirt pocket.  And time drags on slowly as if you waited eight minutes before reading the next paragraph, unaffected by me breaking the fourth wall.  What wall?  The walls don’t exist, the lines are not really there.

---

                I can’t seem to compose a sensible or linear plot.  My attempts at storytelling are futile because of my underlying belief that there are no stories, just things that happen.  To craft a story arc is to romanticize reality, to wrap a bow on a pile of paperwork.  So I’m left stewing in contradictions; self-reference enslaves me.  The result is an unnecessary interruption in an unnecessary story that exists only if you let it.

---

                Instinctive nothing to light and sound.  The transformation of duplicity, mental activity molded into personhood.  We are what we think we are, to ourselves.  I thought.  It had been a long day and I was exhausted but not sleepy.  It never ends; each day with myself, the only person I know.  I thought.

                “Thinking?”

                “Yeah, exactly.”

                “That’s what you were thinking?  The word ‘thinking’?”

                “No.  Well, yes.  But that’s not what I forgot I was thinking.  Er, that was just a word I forgot to say.”

                She looked confused.

                “So what brings you here, exactly?”

                “Does this dog look familiar to you?”  She handed me a picture of a white cocker spaniel with a red  collar.

                My chest froze.  “Yeah, I saw him earlier today, I think.  He was lying on the grass in my front yard.”

                “Really?”  She moved closer; I came outside.  “What happened to him?”

                If I dropped her eyes, they might have shattered on the cement.  “Well,” I swallowed the saliva in my throat, “the dog had a stick in its mouth and ran it over to me.  So I picked it up and threw it into the street.  The dog ran after it and grabbed it –”

                Her stare stifled.

                “A car hit your dog.  It’s dead.”

---

                                Woman in elevator:  Good morning.

                                Man in elevator:  My life is slowly falling apart.

---

                Sadlkuhdas;gha diihdl ;nsgio wher th hll is r u srius ths can’t be hap-en-ing alkushgakulha!  Baseball, styrofoam, several species of small furry animals:  things you might think about to delay ejaculation or mental breakdown.

                She lit like fire and exPLODED onto the street as neighbors were staring and mailboxes opened to cries of her body all covered in mucus.  “Red, red, red!”  “Go, go,go!”  Ah-ooooooh.  And whoosh went the breeze when her knees got untangled and ran with her curls to the pulse of her heart.

                It never ends – this feeling.  The guilt that you get in the pit of your chest is the same as the sweat beads that fall from the nape of your neck.  Then suddenly I’m back on the toilet, hand poised over a trash can collecting the nail clippings as they fall from my fingers.

---

                “Of course I was nervous; it was the first day of school.”

                “So how’d it go?”

                “It was awful.  My mom told me ‘Just be yourself,’ but what does that mean to a five-year-old?  I didn’t know who I was, hell I still don’t.  I was on the verge of nervous incapacitation the whole time.  My only break was recess when I could hide under the dinosaur slide and carefully ascertain the biological composition of the terrain.”

                “And what did you conclude?”

                “It was mulch.”

---

                I’m driving – about to enter the highway from an unrecognizable exit.  Why am I here?  I’m tired, it’s hot, Paul McCartney is singing about fixing a hole.  Like the moment after waking up from a dream, I am suspended in time and unaware of where I came from or where I’m going.  I have to write this down.  

---

                “My grandmother died yesterday.”

                I looked up; she was staring at the grass.  “How old was she?”

                “87.”

                “Oh.”  I sighed contemplatively.  “Is there gonna be a funeral?”

                “No, not really.  My parents are going to have her cremated and then buried, with just a few people there.”  She took a bite of her sandwich.

                “The burial kinda defeats the point of the cremation, doesn’t it?”

                Inhale, exhale.  “Yeah, I guess… I want to be cremated when I die.”

                “What difference does it make?  It’s not like you’re gonna be there.”  I scooped up some apple sauce and ate it.  “I guess that way you don’t have to worry about being buried alive.  You’d probably die faster in the incinerator than by suffocating in a coffin.”

                She giggled.

---

Houses were paperclips and she fit inside an envelope.  Sky stormed compulsively, unyieldingly.  Piercing cacophony bent around alleyways into and out of her ear canals.  Eventually, everything was engulfed in flames.

I went back inside and locked the door.  It was cooler and darker than it had been moments earlier.  The air was electric and poetry began to radiate throughout the house, increasing in intensity inside of the kitchen.  Bloop, bloop bloop. Bloop, bloop bloop.  The faucet was leaking.  I pulled a bowl out of the cabinet and put it in the sink.  Bop, bop bop.  Bop, bop bop.  Percussive brass escaped the refrigerator.  Booooom, booooom, booooom.  Bop, bop bop.  Booooom, booooom, booooom.  I opened up the oven and pulled out my violin, sizzling as I touched the bow to the strings.  Wailing and whooshing  in tune with the airwaves, the sound of the fiddle melted the provolone. 

---

Woman:  Uh… I’m sorry to hear that.

Man:  What are you talking about?

Woman:  (confused look)

Beat.

Woman:  I’m sorry that your life is falling apart.

Man:  Is this some kind of a joke or something?

---

                There’s no need to retrace your steps.  Do I have to spell this out for you?  There is no story here.  Turn around right now and concentrate on what you see.  What is happening?  That is the only meaning you will find.

---

And then I remembered – the bowl overflowing, I placed on the floor. 

                

After Identity

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

-Unconfirmed

     I was always a smooth peanut butter kid.  Easy to spread, pleasant to eat.  The alternative - chunky peanut butter - was gross.  Who would want chunks in their peanut butter?  It reminded me of vomit, and that was something I didn't need on a slice of white bread with milk.  For two decades, smooth peanut butter was what I ate.  Skippy, Jif, whatever.  The brand was not so important to me.  

     Then, a couple months ago, I had an eye-opening revelation at the grocery store.  I saw the two types of peanut butter next to each other in the aisle and instinctively went for the smooth.  But mid-grab, I realized something:  I had never actually tried chunky peanut butter.  I had grown up exclusively on smooth, and had neglected to give chunky a chance.  My bias against chunky was unfounded.  So, being the open-minded egalitarian that I am, I opted for a change.  Worst case scenario, I just wasted a few bucks.  

     The first pb&j I made with chunky confirmed my recent suspicions; chunky is really good.  It has a more stimulating texture than smooth, and offers a slightly different taste experience as a result.  I am currently eating a slice of bread with chunky and raisins.  Ignorant prejudice is an unseen hindrance.

Great Falls

Melville Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System, changed the spelling of his name to Melvil Dui to eliminate redundancy.

Creamsicle yogurt would taste delicious.

I thought of a surefire way to become famous:  attach a camera to your head and put a live 24 hour stream online.  You don’t even have to do anything extraordinary; just live normally, but allow anyone to access it all the time.  This represents the shifting views that society has with privacy as we move into the information age, constantly uploading data onto the internet.  Who you are is being defined by the information that represents you online.  Your “real” identity is becoming more congruent with your online identity.

I read a lot of books but very few second chapters.

Elevator Algorithms

I saw an eyelash in my drink.  At first I was grossed out, but then I reasoned that it was probably my eyelash, so I continued to sip.  Then I wondered if my eyelash is really more sanitary than anyone else’s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy (figure it out)

Why aren’t individual portions of triscuits available in vending machines?

When a sea squirt finds a suitable surface to cling to, it gets rid of its nervous system because it doesn’t need it any more. 

Reading:  Einstein:  His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

Listening to:    Fun Trick Noisemaker by The Apples In Stereo

Working on:                                                          A short story                             

Eating:                                                                     (see above)