A Slow Education

A loud clank sounded off Marguerite’s marquis-cut diamond as her hand slapped the glass which covered our black wicker table at dinner; a small bit of mashed-up blueberries and soft, brown crust squished out her mouth. She made a shield with both her hands in front of her face – mush spewing out – her cheeks bright vermilion; she could not stop laughing. I chuckled, took my eyes off of her for a moment, and watched a frumpy woman with subtle facial hair walking her miniature poodle down the road.

The day started off unusually considering that Marguerite, who typically sleeps far longer than I do, was already up and about early. A hazy light came in through the cracks of our lace curtains; she slid about on the hardwood floors in knee-high socks singing Hey when she sings, when she sings when she sings like she runs moves like she runs with her wet hair wrapped in a blue towel turban-style, cuddled in her Princeton literary society sweat-shirt, sleeves rolled up, taking whispering sips of a cup of fresh decaf Sumatra while I migrated and awoke, abruptly and literally, on her side – the wrong side of the bed.

We spent that evening at a cozy restaurant under a wide red and white umbrella when the sun slathered the sky with a Clementine coat; fat, pregnant pigeons parachuted from the flat tops of tall plane trees which lined the sidewalks every fifteen feet or so, swooping down, causing a loud commotion, eager for a free meal.

While I watched Marguerite eat the remainder of her croustade aux bleu, pausing every few seconds to pat her belly with a satisfied look, I felt that I could picture in my mind with clarity the revolution that took place here hundreds of years ago; the women in Parisian markets demanding that they have their bread; men with garden tools, makeshift weapons and pots for helmets marching through these very streets on the way to Versailles; the birth of a new modern age conceived by the purging of God’s sons and daughters.

Well, that pleasant Bastille Day evening the air was warm and wrapped around my body like a flannel blanket on a cold winter’s day. While we waited to pay for our dinner Marguerite, whose eyes were large and wide, put her hand on top of mine lovingly as we watched two pigeons peck at a piece of old crust, politely, together. Her hair, a mix of burnt rust and sunny blonde, flowed gently like a thick liquid, levitating on the currents of a light summer breeze. She wrote “I love you” in the condensation of her glass and took a sip of her water.

“Going to have a cigarette?” she asked, scooting her chair back so as to recline, “I can wait here for the check. Besides, I don’t think I can get up and walk at this point.”

I said yes and offered her the rest of my crème Brule. She gladly accepted. Taking the last gulp of my glass of Chianti I stepped away from the table and walked towards the front doors, away from the patrons, to smoke a cigarette.

I happened upon an elderly Asian man sitting on the street on top of a bamboo mat with sunglasses on, humming what sounded like the Time’s Are-a-Changin’, shaking the loose change in his cup as if it were a tambourine. When he saw me he stopped altogether and stared up.

“THIS IS WATER!” he exclaimed, in a amalgamation of accents, French, Chinese(?), English.

“Excuse me?”

The man began to rock back and forth violently, pointing at random objects around us (a fire hydrant, a piece of old gum on the sidewalk, a newspaper blowing away in the wind).

“THIS IS WATER! THIS IS WATER! THIS IS WATER!”

At first, I thought what most people in this situation would think to themselves, This guy is absolutely bat-shit crazy. I remembered, right then, my graduation ceremony at Kenyon in 05’. David Foster Wallace spoke and I remembered vividly his opening remarks, a story. It goes: “There are two young fish swimming, and they meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how's the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”
Everything is water; this is water, all of this – it’s water.

I highly doubted that this French-Asian man had heard of David Foster Wallace, let alone a commencement speech he gave at a tiny liberal arts college in Ohio, and assumed that Foster Wallace had stolen the idea from this mystical Eastern French Asian man.

Leaning against the brick of the building I made a wreck of my cigarette and pondered the morning, the uneasy and unfamiliar feeling which crept into my spirit from deep within my depths, the sudden transformation that occurred to me as I confronted a history not my own, but still partly my own. Taking time to be mindful, I began to imagine all the wide-eyed precocious young American students filing into the Louvre with backpacks and marble black notebooks and red pens behind their ears; tasted the beef and potato stew that was being boiled in a tiny tenement home while young black children wrestled one another; felt the reverberations of waves crashing against the bank of the Seine; and, could even hear the whipping cast of a fisherman’s line as it flung out towards some innocent fish.

I sat cross-legged, in a lotus position with my hands on my knees chanting in a perfected language: “THIS IS WATER THIS IS WATER THIS IS WATER, THIS IS WATER …”

when you're awake (you're still asleep)

i want to live deliberate, as if awake at all times; take a piss and think about sewer gators chomping on phone lines, the poisoned rats dead on the surface of the waves – and view it as sublime. i want to think of food but not the meal itself, rather her rough and bloody hands which chop at meat and bone, carrots and potatoes, and the gas which fuels our stove. i’d like to think about where it comes up from, somewhere deep down in the ground, passing millions of soul-less caskets, up past 6 feet and makes its way to the third floor. and then the beautiful thought of the swine i just dined on (from what pasture did he come from?)

i want to read a novel about Jacques Derrida's son, and then think of the machines that printed it.

i want to play my guitar and think about the wire strings and the wind which blew a few leaves off of the tree which was chopped down and made into a guitar. i’d like to walk barefoot on a beach and retreat into the thought that the sand is eroded pieces of a mountain in Spain and think about the hills and curves and dragonflies which die in a splatter on a windshield.

there is so much i am missing – the animals i cannot see far off scurrying about in a distant tree – the air that i breathe. i want to live life deliberate, to think about where things came from and what things mean to me, and you, and i want to think about what i don't want to think about and know the things i don't want to know. i will start to pay attention to the details, the dew on the petals of a dandelion flower that blows in the wind while I pass by, without notice, when all images become a blur.



i want to wake up and smell the coffee

Minesweeper.

Did you ever play Minesweeper? That little game that came prepackaged with Windows. When I was much younger, I would just click around out of boredom, not really understanding or caring what the numbers beside the boxes meant, or the significance of placing a flag on an undiscovered box.

But later, when I became older, I thought a little more. I noticed that the boxes with a little 1 next to them only had one bomb, and those with 2 had two bombs, and so on. So I avoided the big numbers and stuck close to the little ones.

Then I realized that you could infer which boxes had bombs from the numbers all around them. So I can began to strategize, and I placed flags on those boxes that I knew had to have bombs. Then I was told that if you double-clicked on a number that had all the bombs next to it indicated by a flag, it would quickly clear all the other safe boxes.

So I got better and better at avoiding bombs.

I became faster and more successful and... dare I say it..? Elegant.

The cursor would fly from box to box, clicking, flagging, and clearing the safe boxes effortlessly--the mouse always half a second behind my eyes, one darting after the other. But no matter how good you get, you're always going to mis-click and get blown up. It's no big deal. You start over. Other times, you just have to guess. You come to two boxes with a one next to each with nothing else to help. Fifty-fifty chance.



It's more or less a simpler version of real life, except for the fact that the first box you click is never a mine. It might not help you much, or it might clear a huge area--leaving you with a lot to infer. But it is similar to real life in that you can get blown up over and over again.

I've blown up on my first try in real life. Minesweeper isn't like that. Minesweeper's fair. No matter where you click the first time, it'll never be a bomb. I've had every logical reason to suspect a bomb in real life, and I flag it as a bomb. But it's not. Also in real life, an empty space might say there's only one bomb next to it, when in reality it's completely surrounded.

People aren't good at indicating how likely it is that you'll blow up if you stick too close to them.

Passiing Thoughts on the End of the World

DISCLAIMER... DISCLAIMER... DIS-LAMER....
I wrote this like 3-4 years ago and know it's kinda terrible but still would like some thoughts. Still working on the new 10+ pager when I have computer access.... just wanted to post somthin
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hal McCracken was a fifty-five year old male citizen of the state of Ohio. Hal’s primary function as a human being was to oversee the operation of three offset-printing presses for a company called Printec, which was actually a division of the Ohio State University. His secondary function was to supervise the student workers at Printec. Hal generally enjoyed both his primary and secondary functions, even though he had always said that they would cause him to go absolutely batshit-insane. This story is about the time that Hal actually did go absolutely batshit-insane.

Up to this time Hal had lived what would be called a pretty average life. He had graduated from North High School in Springfield, Ohio and had then attended college at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. He was an English major and he had planned to become an English high school teacher.

Hal never finished his English degree at Kent State University because of the shootings, and therefore never became an English teacher. In 1970, when Hal was a sophomore, National Guardsmen opened fire on a group of student protesters demonstrating against US involvement in the Viet Nam war. Bullets from the guns of the National Guardsmen directly caused the deaths of four of Hal’s classmates, and Hal did not enroll in classes the next semester or any semester after that.

Hal spent a year looking for work and wound up getting a full-time job in Columbus, Ohio working for the Ohio State University. His primary function during this time was to move horses out of their stables and then clean horseshit off of the ground and off of the sides of the walls. This is how Hal met Elisa Mendoza, who would wind up being his wife.

Elisa was a very well-to-do girl from a rich family. She had ridden horses since before she could remember, and she was a member of the Ohio State Equestrian team. Her primary function was studying veterinary medicine.

Elisa had initially liked Hal because he was so good at cleaning horseshit off the ground and walls everyday without being in a bad mood. Hal had initially liked Elisa back because she was pretty. They wound up dating each other and after a short while Elisa told Hal that she wanted to be married. Hal wasn’t exactly sure whether or not he wanted to be married so soon until he read a report on the Average American’s Sex Life in Time Magazine. The magazine reported that the average male American had sexual intercourse with an average of thirteen partners during his life. At this time Hal was twenty-two years old and had had sexual intercourse with exactly thirteen partners, including Elisa. At this time Elisa was nineteen years old and had had sexual intercourse with two partners, including Hal. The average number of sexual partners for a female was six according to Time Magazine.

The next spring, Elisa Mendoza became Elisa Mendoza-McCracken.

A few years later Elisa earned a degree in veterinary medicine and began practicing for the university. Hal found a new job at Printec and got to quit his horseshit-cleaning job. They both had remained married and kept these jobs for over thirty years, and had even cooperated in the creation of one human being together. Her name was Kendra McCracken, and at the time of this writing she was twenty-one years old and had had sexual intercourse with three partners. Her primary function was studying medicine at Michigan State University.

Hal had always said that the offset-presses and the student workers at Printec would one day cause him to go absolutely batshit-insane, but in reality they were only indirect causes at best. The direct reason that Hal wound up going absolutely batshit-insane was the large amount of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide that he had ingested while attending college at Kent State University. Hal had not ingested any Lysergic Acid Diethylamide for over thirty years when all of this happened, but the rather large amount that he had ingested in the past was causing him to suffer from Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder.

Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder is more commonly referred to as an “acid flashback”.

The day in which everything was set into motion began just like any other day. Hal arrived at Printec at 7:30 am, allotting him one half-hour to enjoy a grape jelly donut and a cup of coffee before starting up the presses. Hal enjoyed a grape jelly donut and a cup of coffee every morning, if he could help it.

Around nine o’clock the student workers began arriving. The first to arrive was Lester Stevens. Lester was twenty years old and had not had sexual intercourse with any partners (though he would never tell!). His primary function was organizing freshly printed business cards by name and packaging them accordingly. He was also responsible for creating an identification tag by taking one card out of each stack and sandwiching it between layers of plastic and sealing it with heat and pressure. Lester the laminator.

Lester also had another habit at work that was neither part of his primary nor secondary functions. Lester would sneak one business card from each pile into his pocket when he thought that no one was watching. Later he would put the digits from the phone number on each card into his own cell phone and show off to everyone how many different people’s phone numbers he had. Of course, of course, he wouldn’t honestly tell anyone exactly where the numbers actually came from.

Lester particularly liked another student worker named Gina, but Gina didn’t like Lester back. Gina had just turned twenty-three years old and had had sexual intercourse with seven partners. Gina’s primary function was to take incoming order information over the phone or computer and deliver the instructions back to Hal. Like I said, Lester liked Gina but Gina didn’t like Lester back. Gina liked a different student worker. She liked me guy writing this story.

I worked at Printec also. I was twenty-two years old and had had sexual intercourse with twelve partners. My primary function was entering order information into a computer and printing off delivery slips. Hal needed me to do this because he wasn’t “a computer guy”, as he would frequently tell us.

Gina liked me but I didn’t like Gina back. It wasn’t because she wasn’t pretty or fun or intelligent or anything, because she definitely was all of those things. I didn’t like Gina back because I was still hung up on a girl named Maria.

I had met Maria during the time that we had taken an English class together in the spring. Maria had liked me and I had liked her back. We would always sit at side-by-side desks during lecture, and everyday after class was released she would say “Let’s get coffee”. We would walk to the nearest decent coffee shop and discuss poetry and literature and things of that nature, because that was what Maria was interested in. She was an English major and she would often share some of her poetry with me during our coffee-drinking excursions. I told her that I wrote short fiction for fun, and she said that she would like to read some of it. I let her read one of my stories and we haven’t spoken since then.

Maria was twenty-two years old and she had had sexual intercourse with three partners, not including myself.

So anyway, that was why I didn’t like Gina back. I knew that Lester liked Gina and that Lester was a virgin and that Gina had a reputation for being a little “easy” so I decided to let that situation play out as it may. Suffice to say it never worked out to Lester’s satisfaction. I know this to be true because I invented these characters and ultimately control their actions.

I am writing this story. Sorry Lester.

The morning rolled by smoothly and when Hal returned from his lunch break he looked around the room and at Lester and me. Lester was packaging business cards and I was punching numbers into the computer.

“Busy, busy, busy,” said Hal. Hal said this a lot.

Hal always like to have a small radio turned on in the pressroom, and Lester and I didn’t really mind it either. When no one was speaking it made the day much less boring for everyone. Today, as usual, Lester was listening to National Public Radio.

Sometimes, even when the radio was playing, Hal would still like to have conversations with us. I didn’t mind this either. I would often tell Hal about whatever interesting thing I had read or heard about recently and I’m pretty certain that Hal enjoyed this. Lester didn’t really care, and whenever Hal or Gina would ask me questions about my short stories he would just say, “Really, who writes for fun?” Today Hal was talking about riding horses.

Get this: Even when Hal’s primary function was cleaning horseshit off the floors and walls, he had never actually ridden a horse. But after Elisa Mendoza became Elisa Mendoza-McCracken, she taught Hal to ride horses so well that he actually rode competitively for a while. At the moment he was telling us a story about his most recent ride a couple of years back. He was just over fifty and was competing against a male rider in his twenties. Before the competition began, the young rider approached Hal and said, ‘It’s really admirable that you’re out here riding today. I admire that courage’.

Hal beat the young rider in the competition.

“Take that, you son-of-a-bitch,” said Hal.

Hal went on telling Lester and me about choosing the correct saddle, which was apparently of the utmost importance. He told us that his own saddle cost him roughly two thousand dollars.

“Anything less is garbage,” he said.

Hal could tell that we were not so much interested in saddles, so he asked me, “So what’s new, Joe?” Lester looked around the room and stuck a business card in his pocket. The name on the card was Michelle Salmon.

Anyway, it just so happened that I had read a particularly interesting article about the peoples of the North Sentinel Island off the coast of India. I had thought that Hal would be interested in this topic, so I was saving it for such an occasion.

Get this: A group of anywhere between forty and five hundred people live on the North Sentinel Island, and have lived there for longer than any geographer or anthropologist can guess. There is such a wide estimate on the population because no one has ever been able to get close enough to the island to study the inhabitants in detail without being attacked with spears. They even killed two fishermen once who came to close to their island and the corpses could never be retrieved.

I told Hal about all of this, and about how these people had somehow been overlooked when white people had conquered most of the rest of the world, including nearby India. They still utilized stone-age technology and everything. Hal seemed particularly interested when I told him that they speak a unique language that no one else in the world could ever know, and use a unique alphabet also. We call them “The Sentinelese”, but only because we have absolutely no idea what they call themselves.

Just then, Gina came walking back to the pressroom with David Gothel, one of the Printec front office workers. Gina was bringing back an order for me to punch into the computer and David was on his way out to the back to smoke a cigarette.

David’s primary function was hiring and firing human beings at Printec. He had hired me earlier that year. He was forty-five years old and had had sexual intercourse with twenty partners.

Busy, busy, busy.

Of those twenty partners, seven had been females. One of those females was named Elisa Mendoza-McCracken. Hal didn’t know about this, and neither did anyone else except David, Elisa, and myself, since I wrote it. After Hal wound up going absolutely batshit-insane, I would tell everyone that the affair between David and Elisa was probably the reason, so that I could feel better about doing such a cruel thing to Hal with the acid-flashbacks and everything. The truth is, David didn’t even like Elisa, even though she liked him back. David actually liked Hal. Hal didn’t know whether or not he liked David back because such a thought had never even crossed his mind.

“How are you doing, sir Lancelot?” David asked Hal as he walked by.

“Busy, busy, busy,” replied Hal.

Get this: David called Hal sir Lancelot because of a story that I had told Hal the previous week. I told Hal about this old book called “The History of Printing” that I had been reading which said that during the Middle Ages, printers were the only craftsmen who were allowed to carry swords. Actually, the only people period except knights. So Hal experienced a small bout of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder the next morning and tried to carry an antique long-sword back to the pressroom. David saw him and made him take it back home. David didn’t tell anyone about it because he liked Hal and didn’t want him to be in trouble. At the time, David didn’t really suspect that Hal was going absolutely batshit-insane. He thought that Hal was just being funny, or cute, or something.

David smiled and walked outside and Hal let out a quick, nervous laugh. Gina handed me a paper and asked me a few questions about what I was planning to do after work.

“I’m working on a short story,” I said.

“Really, who writes for fun?”

Gina walked back to the front of the building, and everyone got back to work and listening to NPR. I started punching numbers into the computer from the paper that Gina had given me when Lester leaned towards me.

“Dude, she is so fucking hot. I would totally bang her,” he said.

I finished punching in the information for the order and hit the button to print off the delivery slip, but the computer had a malfunction.

A malfunction is when something performs in a way that does not satisfy the needs of any primary or secondary function. Mal is actually a Latin word for “bad”, so a malfunction is literally a “bad function”.

When the delivery slip printed, this is what was written across the bottom of the page:



“Shit,” I said. I showed the page to Hal.

Suffice to say Hal did not take it well. It’s not that was visibly angry or acted incredibly upset. He just became very quiet actually and looked very puzzled. He studied the page for a couple of minutes until David came back in and slapped him on the back.

“Joe can print off the other computer for now,” said David.

Hal remained strangely quiet for the rest of the day. In fact the only other time that he really spoke was when the reporters on NPR started talking about automobile exhaust in China contributing to global warming.

“Even the Chinese are wrecking the planet just like us now,” said Hal. “I’ll bet the air’s clean and fresh for the Sentinelese.”

I didn’t say anything and neither did Lester. I didn’t speak because I already knew that the events of that day would indirectly lead to Hal going absolutely batshit-insane. Lester didn’t speak because he was a lousy, unfeeling, contemptuous asshole.

We all went home after a few more hours of NPR. I didn’t go anywhere with Gina because I really didn’t want to. Gina didn’t go anywhere with Lester because she really didn’t want to, although he really did. I was thinking of making him call Michelle Salmon that night, but then I decided that that would have been too mean.

Hal went home and was by himself because his wife was out of town at a convention for veterinarians. This didn’t bother Hal so much tonight. He was on a mission! Hal had kept the malfunctioned delivery slip and was determined to decode the message.

The funny thing about Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder is that no one actually knows for sure what causes the flashbacks. Some psychologists claim that repressed emotions are triggered that call up memories from hallucinations, and some doctors claim that some of the LSD remains crystallized behind the brain, and then randomly and periodically melts away and drips onto the brain stem. Either way, Hal was experiencing a particularly bad bout of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder at the moment and had convinced himself that the symbols were actually the primitive language of the Sentinelese. They were trying to contact him by jamming his computer with their untranslatable symbols. Of course, he had not taken into consideration that the peoples of the North Sentinel Island had absolutely no idea what a computer even was, and that if he had utilized a Microsoft Word Processor he could have pretty easily seen that the symbols were actually what normal keystrokes look like in the Wingdings font. When converted to Times size 12 font, it would look like this:

LLMMZZVVVLLMMZZVVVLLMMZZVVV

Nothing too outstanding. Hal was never a computer guy anyway.

But he was convinced! There was really no stopping him. I could have tried, but I’m not even so sure that I could have done it. Hal decided right then and there that the Sentinelese were trying to contact him. He stayed up all night packing various belongings, and he purchased an airline ticket early the next morning. Hal eventually made it all the way to an airport in India before he was arrested and deported for public nudity. Hal had decided that he shouldn’t bring anything from the outside onto North Sentinel Island, even clothing. However, he did keep his two thousand dollar saddle, which he threw around his shoulders like a backpack before exciting the restroom otherwise completely naked.

That morning at work, while Hal was on his flight to India, none of us had any idea what had become of him. Well, I knew exactly what had become of him, but I played along. I felt bad, too. It was such a cruel thing to do to old Hal.

After David made several attempts to call Hal at home, Elisa finally called David at Printec. She had no idea where Hal went. She only knew that he had packed up some of his belongings and left the front door ajar. We can guess what David and Elisa were thinking. It was the same thing that I told Gina and Lester that we all should be thinking. I lied and said that Hal must have found out about David and Elisa’s affair.

“Gross!” said Gina.

Lester was very contemplative. Out of character, but it’s the end of a short story and at least one character needs to change.

“It’s all bullshit,” said Lester.

“What do you mean?” I said, playing the straw man. I knew exactly what he meant and exactly what he was about to say. I even used part of it as the tile of this story all the way back on page one.

“Relationships. They fuck people up. I mean, in the end, who cares who slept with who? It’s not worth throwing everything I way, I think. It’s not the end of the world. I mean, I have passing thoughts on the end of the world myself when things get real bad. I think we all do. But I think people just need to realize what’s really important and what shit just doesn’t matter.”

Gina nodded her head and said something that wasn’t really noteworthy. I looked at the ground in silence. I felt like calling Maria.

Hal was hospitalized for a short while upon his return to Ohio. The ‘cat was out of the bag’, as they say, and everyone now knew of his wife’s affair. Including Hal. He underwent psychiatric evaluation, and it was decided that Hal had a stress-induced breakdown.

Lots of adult males have stress-induced breakdowns in this country. It’s called a “midlife crisis”. But those usually happen to men in their thirties, and usually involve a new convertible or working out or tanning. Hal was in his fifties and tried to escape in the nude to a Stone Age island near India.

No one ever suspected that Lysergic Acid Diethylamide was the real culprit, and I never told anyone. Not until right now, anyway. Hal got to keep his job at Printec, and the university even paid for him to have indefinite access to a psychiatrist, should he ever begin to “feel weird” again.

Hal even forgave his wife! Now, as far as he knew, she had had sexual intercourse with three partners, including himself and David. That was still only half of what the national average for women had been.

The End

The Rain

9th grade poem from a scientist:

the rain that night
down it tumbled
with the lantern light
I fumbled
when as if in a trance
out the spattered window glanced
saw the tears
that angels cried
to the ground
and gravely died

in a great torrential wave
down came the rain
the cherubs gave
to wash away man's many wrongs
and cleanse his soul with raindrop songs

UNTITLED (WHAT I'M THANKFUL FOR)

not the pumpkin pie not the turkey, not the cranberry sauce not the stuffing, not the rice and not the gravy, not the beer not the wine; not the smell of it all, the smell of grandma's cooking, scent of her perfume or of her white hair, or the sweat of both the man and woman; not the tablecloth, not the special forks and spoons, not the beautiful wine glasses which twinkle under the expensive chandelier; not the crème colored blouse your mother has just dirtied and not the rings on her torn and battered fingers, especially not the way she laughs or the way dad grumbles as he stretches out like a fat cat lying next to the window as the sunlight generously pours in; not the sound of the doorbell and the beeps of mini-vans as they lock; not other familiar doors that open and close with a creak; not the piano and banjo or the sounds of clothes crinkling upon clothes between extended and close hugs; not the sighs not the smiles not the crying; not the scene imprinted in the memory; not the drive home along the highways of Ohio surrounded by a mass of dead trees that lay on the cold high hills with the moon as my guide; not the invisible tune sung by someone at a red-light viewed through the rear view mirror; not the fingers which shake uncontrollably between paragraphs when writing; not thanksgiving or the colors or the taste or the scent or the visions or the knotted feelings or dark nights snuggling by Christmas lights or words and meanings, or signifiers and narrative: not sense, not nonsense, not logic, not reason, not science, not god – just sad and happy, ever-so-fleeting, life

There's a needle.

Bernard stands outside a hotel room, trying to figure out what city he's in. There's a big needle in the distance, but it's not really that big. Is it Seattle that has the needle? I mean, that needle isn't that big. Is it like a fake needle? Bernie's gotten so good at tripping acid at work that he can't even care what city he's in. He says to the taxi driver, "Take me to the Holiday Inn," after he gets off work. When he's supposed to go back to work, he says, "Take me to the airport."

Everything is automated. When he shows up on the plane, the people all go to the same places, and he stands off to the side while the prettiest flight attendant talks about how to fasten a seat belt or properly die. When he opens the fridge at the back of the plane, it's filled up again with juice and soda. All the meals, whether vegetarian or kosher or halal, are arranged by seat number. It doesn't really matter if Bernie's tripping. It just makes everything much more interesting, yet also more predictable.

So Bernie's still tripping pretty decently once he gets to his hotel. He smokes his Lucky Strikes and thinks to himself, The name of the city should at least be written on a fuckin' bus or a taxi. There are probably maps or something in the lobby. He smokes another cigarette, and then another, etc. The sun sets enough that the needle isn't so interesting anymore and he stops looking at it.

He goes over his daily checklist:

1. 8 months and 4 days since I last drank alcohol.
2. 3 months and 3 days since I last drank soda.
3. 9 months and 6 days since I last ate meat.
4. 1 year, 2 months, and 9 days since I last had sex.

He briefly wonders how Sal is doing, and immediately regrets asking himself that question. I wonder if this is the city we met in and the city where I grew up. A strange thought, but even stranger that it's true. Who knows if the city decided to install a needle somewhere downtown to revitalize the city. He hasn't paid attention for at least two years. He realizes that someone is sitting on the bench next to where he's standing and decides to ask him, "What's in that needle?"
He gets a blank answer of, "Umm, there's nothing in it. You just go up and look at the city"
"What's it called?"
The guy scratches his head and answers, "The Panoptacle?"
Bernard laughs until he starts dry heaving.