Mouth Shadows

Often afterwards but on the infundibulum while or mostly however some to be still yours for trust with swells or with bouillon but afterwards it will be extravehicular. No doubt it varies for each person depending on what they have and among whom they are. Everything in this sense, which is an infundibulum in relation to them, is far too much of this, and in its current state, far too much of it does not relate to anything other than intermittent lucidity, which is sometimes also a form of drapery. A lesser-known name for the matrix of one within the other is, for us, the source of the rituals. Just as indeed the contiguity is the same for the knees and for their gelatin, but equally resilient for the airplane tickets and the modes for the stalactites it is much the same turbulence as for the foliage. It can be done with kisses, through one person, by another, and through yet another, and we do it through these means, creating an erotica of disproportion. Stealing it is annoying, but only if it's in one place or in another. It is in this way that the hornet is able to use its sting to explain the reason why it drinks.  It is a swamp that grammar gives us, in which to sew words together that on paper resemble a sunset coming into being in the sense of music. We don't know much about what the role is like or how to do it quickly; it's about getting involved and making it your own. This life. This hurly burly. This twister. This infundibulum.

Beyond the Renaissance there are the notebook fingers that heal the fissures within the general enigma that constitutes my being. Anyone’s enigma, really. It’s all one big lūʻau. Beyond the hay mounds drifting through the daydream harvesting its pearls within my chronically irritated convolutions is the glory of the west. Some of my thoughts get a little beyond themselves and get mired in quantum bogs of endless rumination. There’s so much I don’t understand. Things like light and gravity. Space and spice and irreconcilable differences among friends. How are space and time the same thing? How much chlorine are you supposed to put in a swimming pool? What if you don’t have a swimming pool? If you don’t have a swimming pool one will be appointed to you by the court of space and time. This is a court in the fifth dimension which rules with a relativistic code based on the speed of light. According to spacetime theory Act III of King Lear is about to begin at the Whitehall Palace on Boxing Day 1606 as a Tyrannosaurus Rex bends down to sip from a spring in the late Cretaceous and a weary old man in a black fedora walks into a Denver bar in the late fall of 1984 and orders a primordial fireball. This is a concoction of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky mixed with citrus and bitter-sweet liqueurs, sometimes with a pinch of sage, and served on fire to represent the hot, dense, plasma-filled beginning of the universe. The Big Bang. Or whatever it was pulsing in the ovum of a pregnant nothingness.

A splash of gasoline will get you to Lubbock. A splash of whiskey will get you to talk. I am not the first time I was ever this palpable. The closer you get to death the more you feel alive. That’s why old people are the youngest people around. Right when you least expect it you might get another chance. But that’s just life being cruel. We've all seen this before, and yet we continue to let the situation escalate. The equinox was there before I smelled the gumbo. Confusion distorts our words. They form rumors of heresy. I stormed out of the room and went for a nice long walk. Autumn leaves stiffen in a fire. I smell wilderness, and mint. I stir chemicals in my mind. I throw the indigo into an ablution of apples and detours. Mouth shadows flow out with the breath. A paradigmatic powder gets sneezed on the diagram. The distance is still developing. We won’t know where we are until we’re there. This is how space works. It milks what it leaves behind. And sprinkles the future with perfect participles. It’s been really great to talk to you tomorrow. I know you can’t see me. I’m down here. Scratching a match on the wall. And lighting another candle. 

 

It's Risky When You Start

One might also say it’s whiskey when you start, risky when you continue.

Either way, you’ve got a conundrum to unravel, a web to spin, a dilemma to solve, a world to engage, a world to examine cautiously, and anonymously, and a world of words at your fingertips ready to probe the world of dirt and rainbows with a variety of radar, sonar, ultrasonic sensors, scatterometers, dynamometers, dictionaries, libraries, moonberries, apiaries, corollaries, emissaries, dignitaries, dispensaries, limitless intuitions and echolocation.

It's risky when you start with a form of water and use a spoon to describe your anguish. It's often possible even to go so far as to do it with some relish. For one thing it won't be this attenuated, it will be suitable for diffusion and make a nice necklace when the words are all strung together. It's risky when you start accumulating them and using installment payments against a backdrop of rising over-indebtedness to obtain certain satisfactions that only a ghostly belladonna can know. Life is a continual alarm going off and that’s what makes Emily Dickinson such an interesting investigation for me. Her poems are like glass slides smeared with bewildering thread. They’re gnarly, like Bacardi, and give off bubbles. Today’s population, as you can see, has become quite enamored of sequins and other sparkly things. They are turning to these for things for timeless enjoyment, like the guy that already has enough tattoos to drive a Grave Digger across the state line into Arkansas on a Saturday night. I have everything I need for the plasma that is the handshake with oblivion, and plenty of cologne for the one that needs a haircut instead of a liniment. I’ll say one thing and you can say something different and together we’ll make a literature get up and do something feathery and weird and you can rely on that. What you do otherwise is none of my business. 

Because of the fact that the virtue with the highest aspiration is one of a dozen in a wilderness of pain and often used for homecomings, weddings and golf tournaments it will include various rums and other spirits, for no virtue however so mojito, can weigh as much as squalor. Isn’t there a pop song with the refrain one way or another I’m going to get ya? Blondie, right? Released in 1979, the year that I learned to juggle, and discovered Duchamp, and drank Glenfiddich. But enough about me. What about you? What are you up to these days? I like walking. And eating blueberries while reading a book. There are things I’ve learned. A leg will help in propping up a nice cuddling by random selection and to mix and pop into quantum equations like chalk and glow from end to end before continuing to oblige whatever it is that gives you a beard and a place to go. I recommend the seashore. Say Copacabana. Because life is a bonfire on the night's archaic neck and from which its music hums in and out like systole and diastole and is acquired through a wardrobe of flowery frills and velocities, the same way it is with a man and a woman to love one another and surpass its ecstasies with a load of toads on them like Terence McKenna.

Spain. The Costa Brava. May, 1972, there were nightclubs in Lloret de Mar that didn't open until three a.m. Franco was still in power. And Franco ran a fascist regime. The Policia Armada carried a sidearm called the Star S Pistol. Whenever I saw them coming late at night, I always checked my pockets to make sure I had my passport. Of course, I went about it very discreetly. They were nicknamed los grises because their uniforms were grey. And also, I suspect, because they occupied a very grey zone in the political spectrum. It felt very Hemmingway. The frontier between the human mind and external reality is a curious zone. It’s odd how a seeming normalcy can exist within a regime of oppression and fear. Take a peach. I love everything about them. The fuzz, the sweet, savory juice, and the heft of their heavenly consistency. They’re far more erotic than an apple. Prettier than a prune. More lenient than a lemon. Way nicer than fascism. You can relax with a peach. And try to forget what happened in Minneapolis January 7^th, 2026.

Boxing during a full moon is glorious. But dancing during a new moon is just plain lunacy. Of all the activities available to us during our brief tour of life, there's one I never completely understood: golf. But I’ll come clean: I never played it. Perhaps if I gave it a shot, the mystery of its apparent monotony would ignite something within, a long-buried need to hit a tiny ball into a tiny distant hole. There are a lot of things I've never done. I've never ridden in a hot air balloon. I've never sat at a conference table discussing complex geopolitical problems with the fate of the world in my hands and a line of coke up my nose. I never dated Brigitte Bardot. I never stood at a gaming table in Monaco gazing discreetly at everything with a knowing gaze, the way Sean Connery did it. Not so much the other dudes. They never mastered it. I will never know what it’s like to give birth. I could never hang Christmas lights on a radio tower. I am good at a few things. Jujitsu isn’t one of them. I am good at spying. You just make yourself anonymous, keep a low profile, and notice things. Little things. Like lipstick on the rim of a shot glass. Morning light on a breakfast table. Orange peels. Champagne glasses. Crumbs. Sugar cubes. Coffee. Body bent forward. Head on the table. Overhead fan spinning round on the back of a tablespoon.

We must try to describe our world such as it is, in this current moment, and from this point onward keep talking, keep writing, keep filming, keep venting our grievances, until we reach the full pitch of life’s reality, which is never going to be but one thing, but a vital conduit to other dimensions, other ports of call where the drinks are cheap and the postulates all burble like rain. In doing so, it is understood that, in case it hasn't yet been possible to ask certain indelicate questions, we must assume a hypothetical chromaticism and push forward like a textbook preface drunk on passion, presumption, and panoply. Ask yourself: why do I bother to protrude when so many others before me have entered the ring with such miscreant bluster? What do I bring to the table, besides bad jokes and Byronic baloney? All of this is rapidly escalating toward a storm in a teacup, which is precisely what happens when a wind baffles a restaurant awning.

 

Little Cloud Sky And The Cataract

Last Sunday, while waiting for a friend to arrive in the spacious lobby of the Seattle Art Museum, I amused myself with the cataract in my left eye. With my right eye closed, I could look at people and focus my cataract on any random individual within range of my vision. Their heads would shrink and distort like a portrait by Francis Bacon. I found this to be an amusing activity for an arty farty Sunday. It was the penultimate day for viewing the Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism exhibit. Play with my cataract was interrupted by two toddlers running up and down on a metal grate under the windows, making a terrible racket. They were creating their own art. Unfortunately, they were moving too fast to give them the Francis Bacon cataract treatment. Instead, I turned my gaze towards the puffy, cloud-like shapes hanging from the ceiling, each one identical to the other with two black dots for eyes and a tiny little upturned crescent for a smile. The exhibit is titled Little Cloud Sky, and was created by the Los Angeles-based art duo FriendsWithYou (Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III). These cartoonish confections of jubilant cumulus weren’t entirely random, not like real clouds, they were neatly arranged into rows, regimented like a military parade and elicited a response somewhere between euphoria and alarm, giddy buoyancy and a bald, high-definition vapidity. I subjected one of them to the transformative mischief of my cataract. The result was unsatisfying. The little cloud collapsed into a Styrofoam packing peanut, not the fierce dragon of provocation I hoped my cataract would awaken by distortion. I’m always misjudging things, including my own experience of them. I like it when things get punchy. I like it when things punch back. Rather than recede, and ghost me. Or walk around in circles wondering what the hell happened.

It Goes Without Saying

it’s the new year I feel like falling upside down
conversing with whirlybirds 
how funny i’ve gone this far in life without reading
Valley of the Dolls
though i did read Stoner
quite recently and learned a lot about the corruption
of academia which came as no surprise
what surprised me was the honesty
i believe that feeling can be expanded
to include my fingers
as i wait for the sun to rise in the east
i’m going to take a deep breath now and inflate
an empire of otherworldly beings
reality is mostly ice
an angel told me that
and whatever this is
because it’s words
everything you experience
is a fuchsia
 
when consciousness becomes words it
becomes a shape
and glows in a grill
charcoal plays tricks
it takes stamina
to flutter your patterns
like semaphores
of fire
they will ignite your brain
and this is called heat
the sanctity of trance
smells of romance
maybe I just need to eat more
read more
books about the transformative ores of metaphors
and the golden faucets of Venice
Vivaldi’s violins
the canals of Venice are drying up
thanks to the miasmic suck
of commerce and tourists
people say get real
I say get unreal
climb into your body
without making a sound 
 
I offer this substitute
of emotional quirkiness
because it’s sublime to feel this way
what a mess to wake up to every day
this is how the search for consciousness
is nothing more
nothing less
than a lobster wiggling its antennae
at the local aquarium
 
entanglements
happen all the time
some things are said
which have no basis
in what Kant meant
they just get said
i’m not going to argue with you
that’s not how i do things
i like to thump my chest
and swing through the jungle
releasing an ululating yodel
if space and time are the framework
within which the mind is constrained
to construct its experience of reality
who can explain the presence of gargoyles
I always know when Baudelaire is around
I smell hashish
you need music
mud can’t play a harp 
but the wind can

if this were a Vermeer
it would look like Idaho
busy doing nothing
because the brush is delicate
i take this to heart
it’s a curious medium
especially when it meanders
sounds become tangible
old brown shoes
with a whiff
of abstraction
each bristle
sparkles when it curves
into feathers and hunts
for a way into heaven
and for that i need a pair of eyes
so i can scratch my thoughts
on the sky 

Existence is a precarious business. Sinuous, convoluted, Daedalean. An old man on the English moor shaking his fist at the howling winds. Humility comes later, after the tragedies and storms. And to each individual comes a moment when the air snaps into words and starts a smorgasbord of ideas. I like ideas. And imaginary solutions, like the art of fermentation. They say we know less about the ocean than we do the other planets and stars in the universe. The same could be said about consciousness, which is maddeningly elusive, like the weight of the air on a G string, and tastes like infinity. I feel better now. Consciousness bubbles along with sturgeon and catfish in its currents and some coastline in its dreams of sweet oblivion. I’m like that French kid, Rimbaud, who drifted down the Meuse on a barge in a drunken state. Except I’m much older, and drive a hard bargain when it comes to methods of overstimulation. I’m more like that other guy, Jarry, who bicycled around Paris on a stripped-down, fixed-gear Clément Luxe bicycle, often without brakes, and using pistols to clear the paths. Except I drive a Plymouth Barracuda and exercise a certain magisterial air in traffic jams, much of it involving my middle finger. Life in the 21^st century is hard. Mortality craves wisdom. But I’ll never understand money.  

My comprehension of the world has turned ugly. I see dead trees. Dark dreary days. It’s not even a matter of hope anymore, it’s a question of atmosphere. Hard to explain. I find it difficult to describe coleslaw, much less postmodernism. Since the riverbed is marshy, the afterlife is filled with a cosmic haze. It feels hospitable, and glows like a son of a bitch. I've been talking about this a lot lately. People nod sagely, then order a piroshki. Somewhere on the outer edge of a hot dog, there are moments that offer something broader to our understanding than nothing at all. Horizons, for example, which aren’t actual things, but seem like things. They’re hyperobjects, like the U.S. postal service, or Netflix. Death is a hyperobject. And so is capitalism. So are oil spills. Antibiotics. Artificial Intelligence. Murderous government thugs on slippery ice. Or the sum of all Styrofoam. Words strung together like a ball of contentious lettuce. If there are hyperobjects, might there also be miniobjects? The sound of rain clanking between your teeth. Gravity trapped in a jar of stars. It has a kind of romance to it. And a strange kind of dentistry. I just want you to know that I can feel your presence. And I’m glad you’re here. 

my anguish is sulfur
my shirt is a fine silken teal
you can do what you want
but stay off of my blue suede shoes
look how interesting a sound can be
and screams
and sirens and vowels 
i can hear a chestnut fall
and hit a car two blocks away
the haunting rhythms
of Zuni gourd rattles
allow me the pleasure
of stepping into the void
nobody owns time
nobody owns space
each sound is an atmosphere
of freely espoused implications
folds of air
so engorged with spirit
garden gnomes
hop around on pogo sticks
 

Consciousness Is Our Ocean

We prove nothing if we remain unknown, whether below or above nothing, which is soul. We have calories that our planet feeds us, or so my instinct tells me, my era, our peacocks, our frolicking in the snow, that’s it, our leverage, our redemption, our burning art, our colossal mimosas and ice age foundries, our brutal subtleties and Apache rattles, but above all our art, our brave and burning art, our capacity for caprice, our tightrope walking and crazy extravagance, our bizarre intensity and textbook dirt. A lot can hinge on a sack of good fertilizer and an acre or two of idiosyncrasy. We can say things here that might be considered extravagant in another context, but here simply means that the varnish is authentic that sings the light into being, the sheen of which can dispel the weariness caused by swaggering expectations. Therefore, I've decided to embellish the courtroom with a character on the wall of Plato's cave acting as judge. Whatever you do, don’t look at the jury. It’s up to you to decide. Is life a frontier, or an incalculable honor? A brush is the one thing that the squeamish might call a gondola, were it not for the stirrups I employ to ride a cowlick, and the clatter of investigations hooked to my belt.

If you’re thinking feathers, I'm already there. The twilight is my testament and the rebus is my paradigm. This is my photo taken in light rain. And this my photo taken in rough garments. I was a push-up then, a peeled banana raining subtleties of free will. Call it a thin Apollinaire and the rattle it takes for there to be a roar at the beginning of a movie. This is precisely what I mean by swarm. It's an eye underneath a lid of skin, swarming with yellow nails. Someone knocking on a door of muscle, and a range of hills covered in birch. Whatever is above it, it offers it, not as a battle, but a slope. This is not what it was intended to be but what it became in the process of jumping forward into the past, and suggested that I walk away from there, which is what I did, and ended up here, wherever here is. I looked around. I planted a flag. I said a prayer. I grew vegetables. And this is the way my shoulders grew wings, and found some other place to get lost.

With what I did to the window I have illustrated what a touch can do to glass. I reached for the moon and got a fondue. After all it's your party and what if your head fell off would you miss it? You might want to get ahead of it. Depth is a slap to the well-tailored, and if I've got a place to go, I get on my bike and drink the sweet morning air. For I am the we among us. The seminal demand. The sweet response. A chorus on stilts enlivening the calliope. It’s us against the one who is next to you, sipping gin. We're over there, behind that range of skillets, banging our spatulas on a juggernaut. This is what I thought it meant to walk with someone into the beyond. You find a common problem and blow air into it hoping for Switzerland to rise and float above the unintended consequences this will release. Wind comes along, and there it goes with it roots dangling down and canopy of floating alpinists, headed into a palace of pumpernickel. I had a feeling this might happen. We are, after all, what I said was over there, steam hissing out of its perforations, because it's massive and full of heat, and until we find my hat and compass, I must assume is the coastline of Ibiza. So welcome. Welcome to Ibiza. Or Reykjavik. I don’t know. I’m handing the wheel over to you now. Consciousness is our ocean, and that’s the north star.

If it is written, so be it. But if it’s not written, here come the pixels. I’m moving along now on a sort of paragraph, a place of lush surroundings with little resemblance to Monday. Or anything made of letters. We are, of course, emboldened, fragmentary, ultraviolet, since we move as a pair of figure skaters, spinning in a frenzy. And this is what letters do, when they spin their syllables into rodeos. I know what it means to put trust in a stepladder. As it happens, my personal resources are unlikely to be enough. I need a wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater and a warm, contrasting sweater. Maybe some alternatives. Vitamins. Enzymes. Trysts. There's always at least one flirt in the room who causes a sound to be there, a guffaw or a banjo. The bulbs draw attention to the back, where a grassy, ​​cracked redness is visible. That's it, our excuse for being here. It makes a sound like little bells, a rain surrounding a secret desire, orthogonal, compulsive, and improbably mink. 

  

Everything Has A Thread

It’s still raining. Flooding is rampant in the state of Washington. It's cold, too. 46℉. It's the winter solstice. 3:00 a.m., I hear a small pulse coming from my bedside radio. Satie. Gymnopédie. I fall back asleep. 8:00 a.m. I get out of bed. The world is still here. I can feel it under my feet. The carpet is soft. It signifies sanctuary and comfort. Why have hardwood floors become so popular? A renewed zeal for material prestige has encouraged a certain petulance, as if fussiness were now a sign of refinement, and actual refinement was seen as outdated as wall-to-wall carpet. This comes from my knowledge of physiology. It wasn’t handed to me. I did it by cultivating fennel. One susses things out by a kind of fumbling. Reading signs. Analyzing tusks. Deconstructing Babylon. Interpreting emotions. Footprints, fingerprints, blood, hair, semen, handwriting, chemical residue, crumpled aluminum foil, fictitious entities, nervous leprechauns, paint chips, skin cells, wet floors. Profiling DNA, CPU, FAQ, EKG, QED, TLA, TSA, FBI, CIA, R.E.M., E.L.O., LSD, NYU, WWI, WWII, ABC, NBC, NPR, and Bikers Against Dumb Drivers. Deciphering graffiti. Visiting Tahiti. Vetting Jeff Tweedy. Erecting a teepee. Scanning the cosmos for radio signals. Noting down anomalous atmospheric phenomena. Casting I Ching hexagrams. Hunting bioluminescent mushrooms in the forests of Paraguay. Studying textures as texts. Otherwise, nothing changes, the prayers for well-being continue, as does Roche Bobois. 

The journey to the afterlife has nails in it, or so I once believed. Something lurking among these words appeals to my otherworldly side. Something striking like honesty, or a kitchen stool with smooth red legs and a vinyl vivacity. Unless I move from this to that, I don't see the other side of the dark matter forming the cosmic web. I just see paint. Skin. Introversion. By what means do I launch this new idea, this new approach to language involving alchemy, despair, ecstasy, impropriety, type A plugs, T.S. Eliot, loafs of brioche, interplanetary dictionaries crackling with celestial mythologies? Language is a chameleon, and where words attempt to create a description of beauty, it gets lost in its own complexity, dissolves into coefficients of verbal bric-a-brac, and merges with the void. For nothing in this world is simply proverbial. Not if it’s made with clay and has a reason to exist. Not if it’s pink, and it’s a Tuesday, and the hardware store is open.

I have a thought beneath what I thought came from the words I put here when I wasn't looking. It's a step down from a job I held in the past, and the events surrounding it have been transformed into a story. It’s ablaze with untenable ideas and fairy tale forklifts. Do you sometimes feel like something or someone is trying to put you in a box? I’d like to help you with your problems, but I’ve got a leaky gasket and a bowl full of bills. Ever get one of those urges to throw everything away and head to the great outdoors with a biology in your destination and a dictionary in your backpack? My progress can’t be measured by pavement. It has the form of a summer and the charm of Saskatchewan. You could call it a gestalt. Or a freshly waxed pair of skis. When we is with us I can turn plural and include everything I left behind. If I was the sun up there, I’d go with my love everywhere. I would. I’m not kidding. Here’s why. I’ve got a plum in my left hand and a plume in my right hand. This would indicate a certain charm, n’est-ce pas? Something about to happen. The sly hiss of potential. This is it then. The big kahuna in my garage. The tuna comes with a motherboard and works by tilting the lumber against the wall, as you would a rawhide. Or the very fat chance of a river of words flowing inside your eyes, all the way to the ocean. Seagulls and mist. Foghorn. Lighthouse. Viriginia Woolf reading a letter.

Our movements are always directed towards the past, but the future is in the rearview mirror, which messes everything up. Traffic lights make things clear. They depend on color. The color orange is the first time anything gave me a reason to go against language both in my passion and my affinity to green, and discover its true nature, which signals me to move forward. There's an equation there that apologizes to us as if it's dealing with Wednesday and has no time for cheese sampling. Equations are like that: supercilious, perfumed, gregarious. If our logic is flawed, we pick it up and smash it against the wall. The resulting image is a waterfall of coins in a Vegas casino, bells ringing, lights flashing, jaws dropping. And this is how we get through it. How we stir the soup, as it were. I comb my hair with a munitions dump. It gives me a wild look. And that’s how I begin my day. I fold the darkness into a jewel and dangle it from a silver chain. 

It's hard to believe that there was a time in my life when I was obsessed with disco. Meaning, I hated it. But what a luxury. To let your mind drift without any intrusions from the so-called real world. The violence of the rich. The futility of the poor. The uncanny persistence of the Stones finally at an end. Arthritis. The art is right but the joints are inflamed. The bones are tired. The muscles in pain. The notes in knots. An epoch is fading into the past while a new one crawls out of the lab of some gazillionaire. If the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up. How do you digest such circumstances? With relish. With vigor. With pleasure. There’s nothing else I’d rather do than do nothing but give off a nice warm light. And sit back and examine all my tendencies and countertendencies. And do it auspiciously. As if none of it mattered. But it does, of course, on some level. Whatever level that may be. It’s probably not all that level. Because everything has a bias. And everything has a thread.

I remember the French landscape. Those two women near Alet-les-Bains who wanted to touch my hair, which was quite long at the time. It was like walking back in time to discover an existence that had not yet lost its enchantments. It was a moment that felt pleasantly carnivalesque: I had become an object of curiosity. I am who I am, but according to this principle: anything that can be thrown into the air that can advance the idea of ​​alterity is welcome. The concept of identity is notoriously ambiguous. At that moment, I was hair.  I was more than myself. I was an algebra of circumstance. The we between us. The banana is peeled, like this: a single touch can ignite the history under our skin. And a chain falls from our body.

 

Holding A Fire In My Hand

Sometimes I think the language understands me. But sometimes, I think there's something else in addition to that. Something I haven’t encountered yet. Even at my age. Which is an odd thing to say. Everything is new when you’re this old. It’s another childhood. But one in reverse. You don’t get older. You get younger. And then you disappear altogether. If the character of the phenomenon is chaotic, it’s no good giving a rational explanation for a man trapped in a dilemma of his own making. The sequence of any action will, inevitably, fall into a pattern. But this does not mean you should remove your clothes and do a dive in La Quebrada. I find myself in a difficult situation among all these possibilities, at least on paper. Call it option fatigue. And give me a drink of downgrade. It’s like lemonade. But with the tang of disgrace.

Nothing means anything. And by that I mean, anything. Nothing is anything that isn’t tied down. But since nothing cannot be tied down, nothing is tied down. The words must be choreographed, otherwise their dance will be like a needle, a thick stick of knowledge in a can of intuition. You can paint the wall whatever color you like, but if there’s a forest in the window and a finger under the soap, I would go with banana mania. If sweating becomes a recurring phenomenon, as it often does during periods of exertion, it clearly indicates a romantic temperament, while if this sample takes the form of a strip of glued paper, it will transmit a flow of music through the piano strings for as long as necessary. Here's how we do it. We begin with a handful of words arranged to mimic the dazzling sidewalks of a fabled port of call and become strollers, amblers, flaneurs, some seeking tea rooms for the peacock set, some seeking redemption in a stained-glass window.

It must be clear that I’m not in control here. I’ve never really been in control of anything. Who is? Even kings need the caressing words of sycophants and courtiers. Or powerful queens with elegant tastes and persuasive charms. All of this becomes evident, sooner or later, as to what someone has to offer when resources become scarce. While I'm next to you, let me dream, I want to know what it's like to be a sentence. Nothing is thicker than the watermark on a kettle. The meaning of this is inscribed on a grain of sand. Am I the only one to not know what it is I’m doing? There’s no point to describing Anyang, China, if I’m stuck in Seattle. Unless, of course, the underlying opportunity here comes with a mooring rope and an interesting irritation. And by opportunity, I mean river. Rivers move. They seem to know what they’re doing. They bend when it’s necessary to bend. They meander with a wizardly circumlocution, come crashing down in a thunderous volume of jubilation, deepen into silence, widen into cypress, and empty into heaven.

It's bitter cold in the car, but the relief it provides from the noise coming from the upstairs renovation project is worth it. Only my hands and my head can feel the cold. My coat keeps the rest of my body warm. The cold is unpleasant, but I can never quite understand what, precisely, makes it unpleasant. It's just a sensation. What makes one sensation feel good and another feel bad? If I decide, mentally, that there's nothing inherently wrong with the cold, but it actually feels good, then why doesn't it feel good? “O, who can hold a fire in his hand,” Bolingbroke argues in Richard III, “by thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
by bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow by thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? Oh no, the apprehension of the good gives but the greater feeling to the worse.” The same might be said of the noise that drove me to sit in the car on a cold December morning. If I think the noise is music, it won’t sound like music. John Cage was able to find music like that. Nothing was noise to him. I lack the power to do that. But I’m working on it. Some responses to the rigors of this world are not malleable, nor negotiable. Death, for example. What larger sense of this I can make also eludes me. But strangely, it does feel a little warmer.