FROM HERE TO ººº º

A cockroach and a flea met at a diversity rally. “Another space in time?” asked the big guy. “Right this way,” said the pip squeak.

Philosophy can be fun. Seriously. It usually has a bald head. To wit – there's neither Good nor Evil but that thinking makes it so. Or, I think, therefore I am, but when not thinking? But to ask this, one must, of course. So at last, in desperation, who thinks?

When all is said and done, when all of this is put aside, nothing happens. So! What to feed Artificial Intelligence? It does not matter. Space and time? It's very upsetting when time doesn't go as expected. Viz., when a ghost comes to visit the machine: precognitive experience.

And you just wanted to get the kids off to school.

This place was built of beliefs assembled. Or more crudely, a beautiful Post Office made of red bricks, edged in white sandstone, with arches and a portico. The mail must go through. Rain, hail, sleet snow, climate change, politicians, ideas of the common person dispensed with a handsome flourish.

Since I'm sitting here, this backyard contains these. Which Twinkie, patient beneath the bird feeder, cannot see. She can see that bird sitting on the fence is sensing some cat intent, though as things are physically arranged here there's no way she'll ever succeed in her evil/rightful/instinctive (check a box for the applicable belief) plan.. When designing a Post Office, not all plans play consciously, but they do all fit together.

Thus no need for constructing a story. This is a do-it-yourself tale. There's enough stuff here, red bricks, sediment compressing undersea, Twinkie's patience --

And as far as I'm concerned, editors have scattered in a particle beam.

Here is where the huge shrug of the earth is felt. So large as to carry me and all the rest along together. One might discover is it not so much seen as smelt, in homeopathic doses of decaying vegetation, forests dying by incomprehensible degrees, insects scouting for different spaces however small, vanishing, remote.

No doubt this lacks the well meaning chaos of a Large Hadron Collider, where reason meets its match. An influence at play is eons of much larger collisions, felt more gently at this remove, ball point ink on paper and in shade beneath the feeder Twinkie's eyes shut dozing, having no bearing on a prop plane overhead, droning on and on into some unimaginable distance, dwindling. Nothing. Loneliness of shadows stretching, the civilization of an afternoon trailing bouts of silence, a surface tension of kids swimming at the Cabana Club, corner of Benton Street, riding the breeze and all that young energy blending with TV ads piling through the back porch door. Mr. Finch landing at the bird bath for a drink. Something to be said for “a line a day,” build your Post Office one brick at a time. My best dove friend has arrived.

Well bred consumers dance on profit strings. Floods rage, the tinder forest flares, hurricanes howl, tornadoes rip the earth. NOAA is pronounced Noah. Leaders ride the storm in frail ships of state that disintegrate in a scattering of pixels on screens in underground bunkers where hawks and eagles scream. The universe shrugs, our ripening pimple . . .but the blueprints, left out in the bright sun, have faded.

Twinkie sits under the bird feeder, watching my friends come and go. I have told her so. And gradually I realize she's not trying to chase them.

“Right this way, right this way . . .”



.