HAPPENS

TO BE

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• It was an oversight, not noticing the locking gas cap. The thief ran out of gas on White Road. Action Tow retrieved my gardening truck. When at last it was back home, the officer handling the case examined circumstantial evidence, and looking around our neighborhood remarked: “You're living in a bubble.”
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• Early on, I had to take refuge. Before nuclear weapons, in a period when the climate was stable, I was born to parents who regarded me as an intrusion. After the first kensho happened, I realized a mental shield would be necessary.
• Since then, similar experiences have been hidden, even from my own consideration, to avoid difficulties in a milieu that regards them with suspicion. But now we do have nuclear weapons, and climate change, and social upheaval, which are fundamental threats to the existence of life on earth. To reuse a pertinent phrase, now it's in meltdown. Everyone feels it to some extent.
• Now the pertinent question: Why is this happening?
• I muse into late wee hours of the night, when it's roomier in here. Limitless. Images shielded from the harried light of day supersede bleeps and tribbles of devices sniffing for data to measure my existence. In here. In bus schedules I am absent, in overdue library books, blood tests, customer surveys. Beyond the five gateway senses, my existence is hypothetical at best. I see this: Oversight now exceeds insight in the milieu.
• What's needed for oversight is knowledge gained through five senses only. As it happens, insight is not amenable to exact calculations. Events defined for oversight are arrangeable and can be reliably repeated. Within defined limits, oversight works as calculated, usually. A case can be built. Intuitive, irrational information can be excluded, along with a more comprehensive reality that is incalculable, and that brings an appreciation for the whole.
• Oversight rules. Insight is ruled out. We have meltdown.
• But I insist. I exist where I do, and even where I do not. Of course my assertion, to rational minds, is nonsense. To which I would agree if there were five senses only. So let the brilliant day people burn at both ends. Shine on, for awhile.
• Into the populated night of redwood forests, through scaffolded towers, rhymes for pumpkin pie, whatever holds sway at the breakfast table. A chair. A glass of water? How did it begin. Where. How long ago? Where does water go when it flows uphill? Where does time go when it's over?
• Empty questions, indeed, until met with an empty mind, flowing on through, sweeping past bleeps and daily patters, street sweepers, telephone pole linemen, snooping real estate pamphleteers, all slumbering as I lavish in the wee hours. An owl person, I'm called. A circadian rebel misfit, the Robin Hood of sleep, bodily cells stalking dawn. Let them keep track. I've slipped through the noose.
• The floor of the Exchange is littered with slips, ballistic missiles locked and loaded. Fortunes become ghosts here. Pomegranates are juiced in steel towers, bleeding out red through agricultural machines. LIGO gravitational wave observatory finds its mouse skitter space-time wobble, smaller than the nucleus of an atom. Walt Whitman on the wall in a universe that fits anyway, no matter which way it's calculated.
• Once it gets going, the Mystery Spot is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's an aurora borealis tapping jazz on a shoe box, taking its place amongst immutable laws. The Heterodyne Law: a radio station's signal strength is inversely proportional to your interest in its music. So after a little practice, one learns to hear beyond the Fabulous Five. And that works out better than discovering an unopened pouch of Bull Durham tobacco in the attic.
• Preposterous visions were training wheels that dropped off during consuminoid boot camp days, the clickity clack of railroad tracks in old movies, speeding wild under storms, chipping away at ice boxes insulated for Chicago's summer heat, and how water flows uphill at the Mystery Spot. That ought to do it. But a warning. Bring a mosquito net because the seas, in this meltdown, are rising. Yes, they are. Bloody pomegranates in summary, and right from the beginning never a problem but that thinking did not make it so.
• My god, look! Oversighters are lining up at the cliff like lemmings!
• Well, what's required for the hegemony of fiction, other than a temporary suspension of disbelief? For time however, so far as it's considered at all, disbelief never enters the picture, does it? Time, taken for granted, is always real – believe it!
• About forty years ago this was all obvious. Until it wasn't. After time lost its mojo, I had to continue for awhile with the same old beliefs, as though nothing had changed, and nothing would seem out of place. Time, the convenient fiction, dressed up like Santa Claus, going from chimney to chimney.
• Eventually, however, reality dispenses with traces of fiction. Chimneys become chimneys again. The topsy turvy world rights itself like a dharuma tumbler doll. In a world of corn on the cob, personal experience counts. It's a way of not making ethanol. An out of body experience, however, is a tough ticket to sell. Telepathy can't be buttered. Reincarnation is an accountant's trick. Precognition is a visit from Mars. A kensho is off the charts. And then comes the day when it's all real.
• So now. Big deal. I'm not the first, why dwell on it?
• But it's not my personal property, not unique to me.
• Now is clearly a turning point in this meltdown world. If fiction begins with a suspension of disbelief, it's quite the opposite with reality.
• Late at night, and so here we are. I thought I wanted to write, to get at least this far. Twinkie is getting off her chair in the living room. She comes here to purr on me. Such a nice cat. Just a few weeks ago she was a kitten, but one with really big paws. She will grow up to be a tiger. She snuggles under my arm, gets one of my scribbled sheets, begins chewing it. There are holes appearing along the top edge. I guess she knows what she's doing. Time for this to end, you can fill in the rest any way you like.
• And so ~
• Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash. Wherever you are.
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