Day in day out consumerism staggers the imagination. I just inked the ballot for my choice whether condoms should be used by actors in pornographic films. Last week North Korea threatened a preemptive strike if they don't like the way we behave. Someone in a rural cottage in a meadow in Andromeda doesn't care. For some reason the price of avocados plummeted, but that was a couple of weeks ago. So it doesn't count.
It's all microrhizomes.
The black hooded finch, with its white charioteer stripe, lands as a feather in dimming light. Ghosts, gremlins and zombies must step aside. My old slippers are friends, like the dog I never had.
When my computer boots, it begins by building an antivirus shield. It will block harmful code. Unrecognized programs will not load until validated with an OK.
The dove in the feeder winks.
If logic is contradicted, what happens? Artists, musicians, writers, creative people in general, known for stepping outside the box, are they OK? A hierarchy of shaded nuances stands guard, granting access to a second class world appreciated at best, depending on who is threatened, but useless nonetheless in bare knuckled opinion.
Yestermorrow through a beaded curtain is being reinvented as I speak. Wooden beads clatter after children on a sunny afternoon. Bees follow, chasing hot dogs and a vague scent. Perhaps a memory. I step out of my antigravity pod, hovering just overhead, and radishes are growing just as fast as they had imagined. A cable car has delivered a pot of blue roses to the retired coal miner.
The beads fall silent in a mountain valley where mysteries are allowed to sleep. There is the trickle of a creek long thought gone dry.
In a jar of formaldehyde on the counter of Pescadero's tavern is Tesla's brain. Star trek gravity waves fall through a wormhole and we reappear in Pennsylvania. It's an old balancing act that began in the transept over town hall.
People, the ones who usually mill around Daisy in her straw hat, said far out! An infinite future collapsing! An end run, they speculated, where tomatoes appear in October in a pot reserved for a geranium. But the roots of it, so far as I could see, were in Pennsylvania where my grandparents landed.
All these children running down the street, and one H-bomb is too many. Do we need them? Endless war is honorable? Forest trees are honorable and people with self-ruled minds. Doves and finches in the dwindling light. Two hummingbirds helicopter overhead. Squirrel arrives for one last sip of water.
“If you were transported to the setting of the book you're currently reading, where would you be?” asks my Kindle. A fly lands on my thumb. If everything is determined and there is no free will, why do I say hello? And this, of course, is it. A set of nested bowls. The topmost one cradling an H-bomb trigger, ingeniously designed to fit onto a ballistic missile, which is cheaper in the long run if anyone's really counting that way.
In my pod we pass an organic farm where free range chickens have a better life than when I was a kid. Schlepping corn and mourning when one was killed for dinner. The microrhizomes stretch back to Hal: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true . . . as Dave performs a lobotomy, sliding out crystal banks of memory. The chickens are saved! Hard to tell where infinity ends and sanity begins.
The stems of radishes and tomatoes are somewhat itchy I have noticed, perhaps being too sensitive. And this would be a fine illogical conclusion.. But not so fast. We were transported to this setting to celebrate free range chickens, green rolling hills, a crushing of political implications. And I don't wish I had a dog.
The rate of falling leaves accelerates. My clipboard is inundated. Fall smells wonderful. A yellow leaf with serrated edges, brown and curled, is the ghost of Hallowgreen.
The gathering of seeds was high tech once. Gathering wood, coal, scraps of radioactive dust, were all the latest. Now Fusion Power is the near horizon.
Gathering behind city gates was advantageous once. Then came sewerage, disease. Our achievements getting in the way.
Not needing a dog is antigravity. But of course that's laughable, right?
