BEING
in veritas vino
the head stone said
right?
In gnomon's shade, blind cricket danced magic. Humpty Dumpty came to watch, sitting on the head stone. He was followed by lawyers on horseback, lariats looping the Constitution, branding corporations as though they were people. Well, actually people they insisted. It's legal magic. You have to file the right forms.
Shall I tell you how I saved cricket, asked Alice, pointing up at a stairway to the stars. I was in IRS Hell, sweating regulations, when suddenly this thing, it passed right on through. Dark matter. Couldn't be seen, really, but the sky dimmed with a flock of capes. I took cricket's hairy leg and we hopped on a floating log, sang the hallelujah rocket launches until those regulations disappeared into a black hole. Truly, right out there in the heavens, we were told this by a bunch of astronomers who'd been on shore cheering. Ah, hallelujah! That's the story.
People who believe this say Humpty wears gloves and shoes, they're reflected in passing windows, and just this side of the event horizon, as pointed out by the astronomers, is DMV. If he's not wearing a hat, he's OK for an ID photo. He waits in line. A long armed lawyer pulls the handle, wheels spin, and jackpot! Three Hats in a Row! Out comes a disabled placard.
Alice yells. Vindication! Rules are rules.
Humpty can't count, of course, whereas calculations of the blind cricket, veritably, are magic. A subtle dissonance ripples through the Standard Universe. Calculators, in their perceived wisdom, only need fingers for moon landings. Some are solar powered. It's a bit more complicated than falling off a log. It's a contest. People in lawn chairs sitting off shore must search for mantras in their old high school year books. Best to book mark this.
Asteroid spooks shadow the Zoroaster chandelier, making astronomers pout and sneeze. And our lonely egg, boiled and peeled without fingers and toes, cannot catch culprits that outrun GPS satellites.
So now, Nietzsche, please to consider infinity, and whether magic has a sell by date. It passes through observatories, telescopes and calculators, even as the learned ones debate, wearing holograms of powdered wigs, circling each other, wary spiders brandishing absurdities that do not compute.
This dance ~ search the web ~ where does it find blind crickets? Who will dance? Not the ones dangling from corporate strings, or the ones that dongle ballroom chandeliers. Readers and fellow searchers roll the dice, tug the one armed bandit, finding not even a penny on the floor yet looking closely down find this trail of gravel leading to something. Right? Alice's pet ant forages a forest of arm hairs, swaying to and fro, tropes of a breeze in cyberspace. Stranger creatures abound.
So friend snail, stirring in your OK corral, spiral down your helix DNA, down your molecular structure, down your atoms, disappearing into quarks and see how far flag waving will get you. That glimmering trail of slime? We already know the answer. It's still being studied by astrologers on cold mountains as we speak, advising astronomers on asteroid calculations.
Out on Yosemite rim, camping with the New Yorker for a night's reading, panning for trout fishing in America, a shredded copy makes fine kindling. The climate booms, burns and crashes. The gas chamber blisters, peeling paint. Unidentified sources have inarguably proclaimed that 4% of all exhaled blather is carbon dioxide. in veritas vino An analyst with a cashier's check on a tray watches grease permeate the woodwork, stops to nail the revised Constitution to a flag pole, and continues, pooching a cloud of chalk dust from the powdered wigs that pass by reciting precedents to quell ghostly moans.
Hey, Alice! Sarah Winchester rolls her eyes. Rallies her ghosts by the stairway to nowhere, clad with gold pans, chopped and channeled, to channel money to living relatives who have graduated university, flipping tassels on Monopoly board graduation caps, pocketing Get Out O Jail Free cards infected with the Ponzi virus. Across the lawn are Woodstock diplomats puffing away on funny cigars, laughing as the virus settles in to cause an insatiable desire for ever increasing sums of money. The golden arches migrate to McDonalds, and there are still trees to dream in.
From atop a distant mirage, some few onlookers nurture immunity, which others call enlightenment, attributed to the fireflies (not injected, Medicare-free, at Walgreens). It's spotty at best.
In the valley, there is a moat. Behind it mutants drive armored cars outfitted with anti-virus zappers, like air conditioners, to keep the Ponzi comfortable and fireflies out. Windows are rolled up and tinted to protect eyes devoid of empathy from being seen from the outside. The entourage is camouflaged to ease invasions. And flung from the trunk leaflets flutter, guaranteeing safe passage for Ponzi successors.
Cricket posts a notice at the side of the road:
right?
When Ponzi infects the legislative host, surgery is required to remove fake people and ghosts before they metastasize. Followup treatments must include taxing the addiction. Proceeds used to prevent further toxic gas emissions.
right
Blind cricket rubs his legs together. Mutants might be reprogrammed. But changes will take debugging and assimilation.
Back at the House of Mystery, snails, Senators and ants slide through downspout gutters, not much difference. There is no magic taco wrap. Not Muir's muse or Emerson's, not my truck's final trip to the Junk Car Graveyard for demolition.
This morning robin flew in beside at the compost. And now long shadows stride the yard. She's on the fence. Circling back to cricket's sundial dance, or Alice's, might emulate a story. But I decline.
Not to end is . . .
