HERE GOES

Smudged face, windblown hair, standing on a smoldering doorstep, the victim: “It looks like a nuclear bomb went off here.” Squinting past recent flying embers. Past the remains of a neighborhood in paused diplomacy, where perhaps a small, white cup of coffee . . .

It is understood the shots will be edited. “It was just things,” he faces away from the microphone, hiding tears. “We'll rebuild. But it's going to take years . . . years to get back to normal.”

The microwave beeps – my cup of coffee! Open the oven door. An iPhone, if I owned one, would it forget my face? Or when the refrigerator learns to compare notes with the microwave? Things I can do without.

Maybe a small fence is needed, or a planter box. But a framers square is nowhere to be found. How to get a right angle . . .

A rope and three sticks.

Plant a stick. Tie the rope to it, then lay the rope out. Use a second stick for measuring. Measure 3 lengths down the rope. Plant the third stick there. Go another 4 lengths, mark the rope, another 5 lengths and make your final mark. Back at the 4 mark grab the rope. Bend it around the 3 stick, and continue, ending up with the 5 mark at the tied up end of the rope, the 4 mark in your hand. Pull the sides straight and set the apex of the triangle, planting the measuring stick next to the 4 mark.

It worked for Pythagoras.

Pushing, pulling to get a few oranges from our tree, which did quite well until the 500 year drought. All the King's horses. It wants an orange that must hang onto its own shadow.

That's not like shopping for yogurt, more complicated. The cart has a wobbly wheel. Brand X comes with emulsifiers. Syrupy music is shattered with breaking news. Leaders, rulers of nations are hurling threats that, if realized, will utterly dwarf California's raging wild fires. On the face of it, pickled radishes seem a fairy tale.

It wants an orange on the baby rack, to become a still life for some painter. In these times that stretch the canvas of a programmer's security. Debug a million lines of code? It's not like smacking a ketchup bottle. Not any more.

In a moment, the lottery of trees produces a winner for the ages floating down. A slightly yellow curled leaf drops into your lap. And if you knew, wouldn't you be amazed? A cat is sitting on the fence. From time to time a bird is heard, waiting for the silence to sink in.

The orange has broken no rules. How does it feel, having no rhymes? Chosen, you ask, for itself? Yet something has been pricked. It will be accused of philosophy. What a pickle!

When you get right down to it, why should this be? Go anywhere, it's still this way. Just because it is?

It might have been an ocean cruise, depending on the tide. But wouldn't that entail schedules, conversations, metal detectors, face recognition cameras, passwords, menu choices (fried artichoke!), entertainments meaning not a damn thing, and yet there is this other dimension that gives rise to the ship, the fog horn passing beneath the golden gate.

Assembly lines raise cars. Ford's great gathering of assemblers now replaced by computer controlled robots that create computers with wheels carrying passengers, where programmers, riders and all, fade to archival data written in assembly language, a virtually forgotten necessity, leaving machines that talk to themselves.

So bleak. Well, let them talk. I don't need an ocean cruise.

The calm after the storm is -- a satisfactory bowel movement. Another dimension, as real as my big toe. See it? It's hard to empathize with those who want to destroy nations. Finches, ants, bees, all harbingers, and fortunately it can't be grasped.