...neither here nor there...
“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
-H. L. Mencken-
Only after 20 years of sex did she think to look at his face. He had large fangs and looked like a gargoyle and after 20 years of passionate lovemaking, Paola from Colombia decided to break up with the ghost. 7300 nights of spectrophilia and who knows how many ghostgasms, all over because Paola opened her eyes. Whenever I find myself lacking awareness I think about this gargoyle-faced fang-mouthed ghost. If we don’t pay attention we might be screwed (by a gargoyle with fangs).
Life is filled with missing moments. A quiet song holds onto my run. My attention touches my feet and the sidewalk talks back to me. My brain is inside of the sunshine that makes the skin spit sweat onto my forehead. The walls blink by as I progress from A to B. I am surrounded by infinity, aware finitely that right here and now, I am not here and now. I am in the moments I pass. And according to the graffiti where I pause, the aliens are already here and wearing baseball caps.
We out here, it says.
I am here, I think.
Today I have been getting text messages from people that don’t exist asking me how my day is. They send fake pictures of “themselves” and ask that I do the same. I try to keep them talking to me long enough to tell them, “I train wolves”. I then send them photos of a young woman with a fish on her head. The conversation ends sometime after they figure out I am not an old grandma who might send them money as part of a scam I am not sure I understand.
I wonder what they talk about at the lunch break in their call center. Our life is a digitally shared fantasy inside of a phone. I imagine the real person pretending to be a fake person all day wishes they could be real sometimes. If they ever texted the truth what might they find out about themself? I would still probably send them a photo of a young woman with a fish on her head. That is my truth.
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
-Winston Churchill-
A different wall at a different point of a different run said “U R HERE”. It was a righteous wall, certain that whoever witnessed it would believe in its truth. I stared intently at it, imagining that I was anywhere else, but inevitably here I was. I thought it was convenient for the wall to know so much about me. I wonder if whoever built the wall knew that I would be there eventually. How many walls had they built and how many heres were there? You can find yourself in yourself. You can also find yourself in a wall.
My landlord cut the largest tree from our front yard and now it is easier to see what the trash left behind by strangers looks like. I think Louis from four doors down left me just a single Dorito in his crumpled bag next to my dry bush. Mary with the purple Pumas might have left the coffee stained pillow when she moved out of her apartment next door. And it is reasonable to assume that the dead and faceless skull-chinned mouse is a gift from the fat dust grey tabby who sleeps on my Honda’s hood.
Are they leaving me messes or messages? Today I found an unused paintbrush and a card from a flower vendor named Sweetpickles. I like to think that this was an intentional marketing strategy. They put themself on a card, put the card on my yard, and now I put the card here. We should buy flowers from them. I am leaving the paintbrush in case any al fresco still life emergencies emerge in the tree’s absence.
“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”
-Frida Kahlo-
Even the most random acts of randomness have a form in their chaos. I believe in luck and fate just as I believe in the potential to create your own luck and fate. Down an alley around the corner from a street I never run sits a car covered in debris of expansive variety. The vehicle is cosmos in car form. It is a trash can. It is a spaceship. I don’t see any possible way it became what it is without intention and purpose. Is this the vessel that will take me to the cap-hatted aliens in my neighborhood?
It dropped me instead at a laundromat next to a locked 7/11.
A pink bear in a tunic sat alone staring at the twirling wet pile of 6 blankets, 3 towels, and 5 napkins I washed with organic lavender scented laundry detergent. What journey had it taken to be abandoned on a webbed blue metal bench here at a north Oakland laundromat? A woman I didn’t know told me I could take the bear but it felt like too strong a commitment. I didn’t know where it had been, and certainly didn’t know where it should be going.
The next time I did laundry the bear was gone. I sat in his seat and watched a twirling wet pile of 4 blankets, 5 towels and 6 napkins spin in a bath of organic lavender scented laundry detergent. The same moment felt different. I have to bring my laundry back here again in 3 weeks.
“Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.”
-Marcus Aurelius-
In the first Sunday night game of the 2023 NFL football season quarterback Aaron Rogers of the New York Jets tore his achilles tendon. According to the news he believes that the sounds of dolphins having sex will help heal him. There is a newspaper that paid money to a writer named Isabel Baldwin to build an article around that premise. That same newspaper told me about Paola who broke up with her ghost paramour because it had fangs.
This is my news.
I think it is important to see the things we see, and to tell people about those things. I think no thing is ever the same thing, even if it is the same thing. I’d like to believe listening to dolphin doinking cures injury, so I tried to find the sounds of dolphin sex online and instead happened upon an article about a woman who had doinked dolphins for NASA in a series of experiments that were eventually shut down after they found out the dolphins were also being given LSD.1
This is my news.
The sun shines on a thousand rocks overlooking a set of seventeen forested hills. I take the photo so I can share it here. U r here, said the wall next to an alley on a run in West Oakland. We out here, said the cap-hatted aliens across the street. I am here, I think.
This is my news.
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
-Marshall Goldsmith-
FOOTENOTES
https://www.ladbible.com/news/animals-woman-admits-sexual-experience-with-dolphin-as-part-of-nasa-study-20210918
Commenting never seems sufficient in response to your essays. Maybe I'll go out and find my own trash pile today instead.
a card from a flower vendor named Sweetpickles - this one I can explain to you, it belongs to Mr. Tibbs who lives up around the corner and is a retired Florist, or semi-retired it seems.