THE

WAREHOUSE

When I was very young, in the young days of radio, and late at night The Whistler came to me, he was so real. It was a miracle. No one was watching so it was OK to thank my radio for its tireless efforts. I knew, I still do, that it was just a radio and most people don't thank them. But recalling this just now, the feeling of profound gratitude plays back again undiminished.

Better than anything else, this confession of unquestionable weirdness will illuminate or explain somehow the startling reality of silence. The warehouse is filled with intangibles that never did and never will become tangible, or that might. Anything from building a mud dam of sticks and rocks on a rainy day to becoming a solo clarinetist.

The radio knows in silence that it is a radio. Mr. Finch knows we both like cookies. The universe knows it is the universe. The intangible ability to persist everywhere doesn't leave much to say, does it?

It plummets on, mocking time, what will happen? And next thing you know it will be the past! My radio sheds a tear. And why would anyone care to hear about the evolution of radio tubes, triodes, pentodes, cathodes and anodes, and skipping ahead a few steps, on up to directed energy beams, if it wasn't for the present? And a sort of undertone of justified strangeness. If not for some recognition that, unauthorized, strikes a chord within. Rings a bell.

Maybe in a day or so, having moved on to something more startling that completely supersedes this, it'll be possible to read back here and see if it might be interesting. Would this be the kind of thing I'd actually stop to read? And why?

A hint of peppermint perhaps, freshly picked leaves in the morning to garnish a steamed apple. Who knows what'll happen. I think it's possible to see through all the layers stacked inside, how they're transparent in so-called reality, and knowing there's nothing to say, yet say it in some crazy way. (He got on his horse and rode off in all directions.) Disappearing. Gone! Silence.

The simple point is made. But the thing just keeps rolling along, contradicting itself, never really done, never a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but an adventure.

So it's the quest for the big picture. And why is the world so messed up. Or how could it be so beautiful? Can it be changed, or is that asking too much, or is it just a matter of waiting or learning to go with the flow, or would that be irresponsible, knowing what you know? Or do you? Do I? Who am I?

Maybe it's best to begin with sand. Little particles. But sand's not good because it's more like layers. Well, since even in the womb, or before if you're up to risking it, the mind we came with is busy building stories out of observations. They all get stored. One mind like mine or yours can store much more than all the Artificial Intelligence now fearfully revered. An inconvenient but appropriate comparison would have the AI firecracker face off against a thermonuclear sun – that's us.

This vast warehouse of ongoing operations, evaluations, estimates, fount of ideas. Busy, busy, out of sight most of the time, beyond hearing, but setting moods, hunches, when we'd like not to be bothered while driving or having a conversation or whatever. And when the quest leads into this realm not far off, it's difficult to imagine an entire lifetime is recorded here in detail.

But there comes a day, I guarantee it, when the whole panoply is no longer quite so real. My humble radio, for instance, and the still felt emotion in its original intensity, are states of emptiness. And how is this?

What was eminently normal loses its hold. Thus, the sane understanding of normal is poo bah. There is this great, vast emptiness impossible to comprehend which I am, in great detail, as granular as sand. I am microscopic in a macroscopic way. I would still enjoy riding a bicycle, and not just for the fun of it, which is the main thing if you're not indentured to delivering milk or eggs, but in the demonstration of complete balance. Its an ordinary life that rides this inconceivable mind, and at least as well if not better than our vaunted technology.

All these puttering words. What else does anyone have to scratch the surface with? You will join me, having penetrated this, in a good laugh. In the strictness sense, we do not exist, yet here we are scratching around, playing marbles, drinking orange juice for breakfast. Words come and go. Worlds. Galaxies in the process of converting mass to energy. If energy is not matter, where does it go? If matter is not energy, where does it come from?. This mind is in the midst of dark matter and, in my own experience, the way matter behaves has only a scratch pad relation to the normal application or understanding of time. Laughable.

This might be ominous to normal minds but, to quote the Men's Warehouse (ad), You're Gonna Like The Way You Look. It's a warehouse kind of thing. I guarantee it.