Strangely, it could be a Monopoly piece, had the game developed differently. It could be called a pataphysical anomaly. It is oblong, three visible dimensions, four flat sides, the topmost level built up in steps.
Oh, a staircase!
That ends abruptly, going nowhere.
This is difficult to imagine. But I did not imagine it. And to complete the description, obviously useless, it is neither red nor green, not even grey. It is, however, mysteriously illumined by a light that shines only on itself.
Sometimes I grab the pen, sometimes it grabs me. Sometimes writing is fun. Late at night, the quiet speaks for itself. The turn of ordinary phrases becomes a cartwheel, and something I could never invent comes rolling out on its own. For instance, your perusal of this participates. A parking garage is not really a memorial graveyard. Ordinary losses on the stock market hark back to this Scottish guy who thought the hand he was dealing would be invisible.
What's classically invisible promotes a strike of lightning, the pen writes, and what am I to make of that? It doesn't make much sense. Join me in a cup of laughter, it answers.
I wish I could write stuff like that.
It slides on over the page, pretending the earth is flat, and taunting physicists with an image of me, sitting on the edge, dangling legs over the abyss, which everyone knows is just space, empty, and warped if you're massive enough. So they say. I say ('scuse me, pen) that's science fiction.
The Red Queen jumps on it: Off with his head! And the rest of you – shut up and calculate!
Dear pen, I opine, this sheet is not an Ouija board.
Silence is golden, it says, staring sullenly.
My editor drains his cup, breaking the impasse. It's not entirely fair, but effective, according to authorities who have emerged. From the abyss. Not for all the gold in Fort Knox, they affirm, would it ever pen out. A passing fantasy, a shambles, eggs frying sunny side up.
Bald eyed sky and tumble weed on the move. Impossible not to see the neighbor's red roses over the fence, growing high. I have refilled the watering can after Mr. Finch came for a bird bath.
Twinkie, though she has just one working eye, is lithe and a beautiful tabby, and mischievous. Cats don't like water, right? She's investigating the latest thing, putting paws up on the lip. She's batting the water! Tasting it. In the morning she fearlessly attacks a mountain of blankets, risking complete burial. Not that she's dumb. In fact, she's smarter than most people think. And as I've said before, she has a sense of humor. For all of this, however, she's shown no interest in the roses over the fence. And that does leave the conversation open.
Beyond the roses, what? There is the red spot on Venus, or Mars, the iron oxide covered planet, hemoglobin coursing through our veins, depends on where the conversation happens, right? Red bell peppers. Get 'em at Safeway.
It's more than can be thought, he lays down the words. Well then, maybe some pictures. Includes a few. Laughs. There are one-eyed people reading. The metaphor pops out like a hand clap in pataphysical debate, the meaning obviously out of hand.
What's all the rage now is this mass insanity thing. An epidemic largely undiagnosed because of all the busy people. Crazy people have lots of normal things to do. Twinkie jumps up on my clipboard and meows. Would I please slide the screen door open?
If only everything would arrange itself neatly. Is she immune? Perhaps it's a crazy question. I slide the door open. After all, there are these things, like her kibbles and my oatmeal for breakfast. She's back and parks beneath the bird feeder. Though she never catches one. We have our places. We sit together.
It's that time of evening when the birds will arrive. And squirrel. The sun will slant in to shine on my chest, and the pleasant warmth. Asking for an orderly exposition is akin to herding cats. But there is a herd of gnats that also bob and weave, showing up brightly against the darkening fence. In a gnat's eye . . .
The overall view – lack of it is what drives insanity. Maddens, sometimes deliberate and reactionary against causes partially discerned, and then spreads pervasively. There are terms of art such as “the new normal” that bring no resolution, no comfort, and certainly no understanding. The collective consciousness, subliminally addressed, responds with incomprehensible horrors.
Doing nothing doesn't depend on me. In my absence it continues on just fine. There's no where to go that isn't here. The possibilities are mind boggling, and yet just this comes out to play. A fly comes to sit on my clipboard, looks me in the eye, and commences front leg grooming. “I am grooming,” it does not say and as far as I can tell, stretching credulity, suspending disbelief, it is doing nothing. The very fact of just being here is not watching a movie. As in more than seventy years ago, privately, just beside the pantry door under the avocado tree, and sun translating through the leaves, skipping time. I was surprised, singular and powerful it felt, but unable to pause for a footnote while merging with the green universe. Seventy years is nothing. In a morning of chopping vegetables, doing nothing was interrupted briefly with the footnote: “Afternoon light through avocado leaves.” So I wrote it down, while clearly seeing once again the green veins, and the mood unchanged, different but the same again of remembering then and now together, the hunch completed in the kitchen. It's a mobius celebration.
Sun skirts beneath the hanging leaves, and it is warm, hosting gnats that are pinpoints surfing invisible waves. Someone has fried a meal. Hardly a breeze is stirring, a reminder that carries off permissions. Definitions of words are helpless, and no appeal to archetypes will float. You, dear reader, cannot search an olfactory archive to find this. Clumsy words, and a small white butterfly flutters through, there are as many as there are you. An evening meal sending its scent. Isn't there something free in this? All the more that it cannot be spelled. And as I've said (am I repeating myself?) Twinkie has a sense of humor. I must be getting old . . .
And so? Wisdom is a many splendored thing . . .
Thing?
There he goes again . . .
Shut up, pen!
