CREEK SHIMMER

The first sign, a twig floats by. The stream deepens, rising by degrees to become a pool for the scryer:

    “It's like a bad dream.”

   “This can't be real.”

Here in Santa Clara, the City that proclaims it is the center of what's possible, there is a realization that everything is the center of everything.. As elsewhere, citizens for the most part don't philosophize much and probably miss the humor. But in fact this preamble, given while balanced on one leg, comes from one who once stacked rocks.

To kick it up a notch, or put it in another key if that makes more sense, real magic is more than skin deep. So let's hear it: Swing free, sweet chariot, my liberated ape in the high limbs. Money grubbers below are offering complimentary ball bearing garage door openers.

Following my caterpillar's sea fur surface into regions missed by scorched earth educators, I found our ancestors. There at the origins, and it was before anyone had thought of time. There was the thread, shinnied up and down by a spider working through to come out the edge, dangling. The sense of it still justifies gauntlets and elevators, railways, nefarious dreams and tall buildings. For others.

Remember gas light street lamps? Swamp gas burns brightly. Now in their stead we have light emitting diodes – ka Ching! My pattern has retained some probability, but not what people expected. In the volley it's bit coins versus a cash register.

Those early years, so impressionable, found a store counter cash register with its sliding drawer was a work of art, created out of base metal embossed with leaves and vines winding, styled after the engravings on paper bills held inside. Surely the coin bins must hold something precious? Said my elders, cash is king. Straight away I raised some doubts. Metal, like agates, has its own value. Paper bills, however, can be kicked up a notch by simply adding zeros. In the central bank we trust. But what if it goes bust? And more practically speaking, what if I should redeem a bill with lots of zeros? Would my Red Flyer wagon bear the weight?

Such thoughts were to be suppressed, smart ass kid. But OK since dinosaurs were obviously more important.

There is another side to the unexamined leaf. It might last as long as a ticket to the Winchester House, forgotten in a back drawer for sixty years. With the mystery all leached out. Moth eaten. Nothing left but the veins. No arguments about the road not taken, all having been eaten out. Not a pretty sight, is it? What was possible is now absent. But philosophically, how can an absence be any more substantial than a speculation?

The City at the center bought into infinite expansion, like many others, and partnered with the 49ers to get a stadium. But it's not panning out. Stadiums are incubators. And no matter how broad the social distance, the air is unhealthy with smoke from fires caused by unseasonable lightning, all made worse by an unprecedented heat wave. And this is not even the tip of the iceberg. In fact it has melted.

We speculate about the future. Possibilities vary. But once it's known, the range collapses to a certainty. Knowledge obtained by a reasonable extension of current conditions, is calculated to unfold according to laws already proven. Knowledge obtained without reasonable calculations also collapses the range of possibilities. Either way, the range will come to center on a current event. And this leads not just philosophically, but all the more disturbingly, to the question: What is now?

The twig has disappeared.