I do not see that you have a problem. You just have a whining problem.
This is true. Thank you. I feel better. Much better.
Don’t go getting carried away.
No. Do you know the difference, by the way, between France and India?
I do not.
If you look out the window for thirty minutes in France you will see a dog take a shit, in India a man.
Why would a man capable of or interested in an observation of this caliber think he has a problem?
You have been most helpful to me today, Sir.
Do you see this hazard of steel appearing—
What is a hazard of steel?
I don’t know. But it appears to recede into infinity, rails of steel or a channel of steel, somewhat like a steel trough, except it is heavy and precisely machined – it is like a giant pistol action the size of a railroad, you might say.
All right. Let’s say I might say that. It is not clear to me why I am saying it or why you are saying it. What about the hazard of steel?
Well, I see it. In my mind.
You see in your mind a railroad-sized pistol action receding out of sight. To the exclusion of all else?
Well, no. I don’t see exclusively the hazard of steel all the time, but when I do see it I will say that at that moment I see nothing else. It fills the screen as it were.
So you don’t see, say, cedar trees and rabbits marching also into infinity beside the perspective of steel.
No. And that is a good word, perspective. It is a perspective and that is what occupies your mind, not the surround, just as in seventh-grade mechanical-drawing class they never had you draw in the parking lot and trees around the building that also I might note seemed poised to recede into space.
So what you have is like a seventh-grade vision of a giant pistol action stretching let us say from New York to Moscow.
Or beyond. The steel looks so polished, so well cut!
Nicely oiled?
Finely oiled!
And when you behold this vision, you are disturbed by it or—
No! Made completely, utterly content. I love the hazard of steel. I want to work the giant action!
Do you think it tenable that our brains have gone?
Yes I do.
Have you had further occasion to view the hazard of steel?
No. It has been replaced by a vision of flowers.
Giant flowers issuing from the giant pistol action?
No. A field of gladiolas. Tended by a blind man. On a three-wheeled ATV. The glads are sold from a jar in a shed by the road on the honor system. The honor system tends to stick in the mind when you see it.
I will never forget seeing a refrigerator full of Orbit beer sold on the honor system at a motel in the Florida keys. I wish I could recover that moment.
Isn’t it wanting to recover moments that undoes us?
Yes, I suppose that is what undoes us.
How should we seek to not wish to recover moments then?
I propose two ways: repudiate the recovering of moments as childishness and embrace the covering as it were of the present moment in such a way that the recovery of a moment past seems moot.
It would seem to me if we could effect option two that the repudiation of the recovering of past moments as childish would be moot, so you are really proposing one method.
So be it.
It is simply seize the day, in the way that the day was seized the day you saw an Orbit in a rusty refrigerator on a slab in Pine Key at the Rainbow Motel if it was not the Peace Inn and put $.25 in a cup for it and thought you were in an already passing-away time, and were, but you were seizing that time at that time and were in it and now it stands for its very vigor as the kind of moment cleaner and better than the current dull ones you are not so seizing and enjoying.
Yes. That was a mouthful but I think you have it right.
Have you noticed that everything is leaning a little bit today?
Leaning?
Yes, off-plumb. Maybe it is just me.
Are you dizzy?
No, but I swear that pot right there is hanging not vertical, and those decals you pasted up of that grasshopper are not symmetrical anymore, and, you know, isn’t everything just a bit leaning?
I think you are right.
Should we straighten everything?
I think not. I don’t think us capable, one, but I see no reason to undo the charm of things leaning. Things are finally getting in tune with us.
About time.
Yes. Leave the horse’s mouth alone.
I wish we owned a forklift. Be fun to drive it around and pick impossibly heavy shit up.
Is it amazing how fast things break down now?
What things?
Us.
Oh. Yes. But that has, we have, always been breaking down.
That is technically true but when I was twenty and looked like a beautiful girl and beautiful girls would pay attention to me because of it you could not tell I was breaking down.
Well, you can tell it now that you look like an old man and will soon look like an old woman.
You are vicious.
Yes. Do you know the original meaning of vicious?
No.
Me either, but I recently read it and it is something quite different from what one is when he tells someone he is an old man soon to look like an old woman.
Probably in the early innings of vicious there was not enough meanness about for old men to be telling old men they would soon look like old women.
I recall it: tending to vice. That’s all it meant.
Well you don’t tend to vice, you are vicious, a vicious bastard.
I must say we have much improved the word over time.
As we decline the words get better.
That is how it should be. They are our children.
We become old women and the words go skateboarding.
I am down with it. I need a vicious drink today.
I wish we had a live-in bartender.
We should have an entire Court. We are Princes.
Yes we are. Just exiled before our time.
I feel like walking in the woods that do not exist and talking birds into sitting on my hand with the promise that I will not hurt them.
I had a dream that someone’s wife visited me in bed.
Anyone’s wife?
No, a particular someone whose name I daren’t mention. I was dreaming in the dream that I was kissing this woman and woke up still within the dream to discover that I really was kissing her. It developed – in three syllables or fewer – that she had been trying to get me to meet her down at the dock but that my prudence did not allow it so she knew the only way to have me was to slip into bed while I was helpless and asleep and have her way, and this alas she had done, she was as proud and bright as Jack Horner. She was face-down in the bed at this point and spread her legs and said, Do you like my apple?
Did you avail?
I took a bite of the apple before it occurred to me I was not free to bite with abandon. Husbing.
Ah, you had the old husbing-still-looks-at-his-wife delusion.
Yes. Well, I was after all in a dream state. And this apple was worthy of inspection, which is why I straight-off took a bite.
Why can we not live real lives?
I don’t know.
We are done?
It would appear we are.
I have noticed this morning that my shins have grown thin and sharp.
We have bird brains, why not bird legs?
I suppose. Still, when your leg feels like a knife, it is sad and alarming, quietly.
I can accept that.
I want some bread pudding.
Let us locate the best bread pudding within our reach and get on with dying.
Do you know what cabildo means?
No.
It’s a miracle.
What’s a miracle?
Nothing.
Why’d you say something
was?
Felt like it. It felt like the time.
You’ve waked up mindless again?
Yes. Just what is wrong with that?
I have tendered no criticism of mindlessness.
You better not.
I merely seek to verify.
Isn’t something a miracle, though?
I’m sure something is.
I am too.
I don’t see one at hand.
Well, they’re rare, that’s inarguable. If they were common, they would not be called miracles.
Your logic is sound. It is not altogether mindless.
Coffee bean.
What?
Would not a coffee bean be a miracle?
Easy now.
Why is not a coffee bean a miracle?
Because then, ah, so is a cup of coffee and an idiot, or two, drinking it. Why not say a bird, or for that matter, a bird’s leg, is a miracle?
Not a wing?
Wing schming. A bird’s leg came off a dinosaur, for God’s sake. A scaled powerful appendage shrunk to 1/500th of its original size and attached to an animal that can fly. Where would miracles cease if we allow coffee beans and birds’ legs? Miracles would not cease. They would never, properly speaking, not begin, never not have begun.
Everything is a miracle.
Exactly. And a minute ago you said nothing was a miracle.
A minute ago nothing was. And you said I was mindless.
You were. Now you’re not.
I am happy. Are you happy?
No I am not happy.
I wish you were.
I do too. I am happy that you are happy.
If you were happy too, it would be a miracle.
Yes it would. It would it would it would.
Look: here’s a coffee bean, a bird’s leg, and your happiness. Is it so farfetched, you poopoo train?
You remind me of the halcyon time when my father camped out on Lake Rosa with his strange uncle Jake. I envisioned Studio doing this earlier, but really it was my father. They did this on private land. There were so few people then, and the few people knew each other, so that camping on private land did not then, as it does today, constitute trespass and grounds for prosecution and trouble. They camp out on somebody’s land who does not mind and they catch giant bass by throwing the lure called a Dillinger. A Dillinger looks like a small wooden cigar with propellers at each end and it is painted to resemble a zebra. Actually it is painted to resemble a convict suit, black-and-white striped, hence perhaps its popular name. The real name for the lure was a Devil’s Horse. This caught fish in that miraculous day of absent litigation, friendliness among people, and large and plentiful game. I feel like weeping.
I am weeping.
We are fools to even try to be alive now.
We are not, really, alive now.
No, we are not.
We are not miracles either.
No. I can see my young father and this odd fellow Jake having coffee they have brewed over a small fire in one of those agate coffee boilers that look in profile like a laboratory beaker, sort of—
Triangular-shaped.
Exactly. Bad coffee badly brewed, overbrewed, boiled probably, actually ruined-ass coffee that they find delicious, that is delicious if you are lying there on that clean ground under the live oaks on the slightly painful acorn caps apprising the morning and the fourteen-pound majestic monsters you have caught on such a ridiculous artifice as the Dillinger, which is at rest suspended from a rod and reel leaned against the live oak they are under. My father will go into World War II as a Marine and suffer hardship that is somehow not different from this very pleasure he and Uncle Jake are enjoying now.
I don’t see how you make that connection but I do not dispute it.
Dispute nothing.
Disputing nothing is the first step unto miracles.
Disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of happiness.
I’d like to find a pill and go back to bed. I’m wore out.
Go on. I’ll tidy up and look out the window some. I’m tired too, Helen.
I wish Helen had slept with Tim.
Tim’s whole life might have taken a different course if she had. Oh, Tim, I’m tired. I’m tired too, Helen. It was brilliant.
But it did not make her get untired and sleep with him.
She was young.
She was tired.
We are all tired. Who is ever not tired?
I know, but she was young.
I have been waked up by one of my stupid nightmares.
There is another kind?
Yes. There are real nightmares that are inventive and psychologically telling and entertaining to recall and that demonstrate all manner of deep-seated truth, etc.
That you pay people money to interpret and so forth.
Right.
That you never forget.
Right. These I am talking about you cannot remember for five minutes, if that. They operate just long enough to get you out of bed, which apparently is their purpose.
Give me an example.
Okay. Say you are divorced after a long period of chilly relations and there is no prospect whatsoever of reconciliation. A stupid nightmare would have you envision very sentimental carryings on between you and this estranged wife and imminent desire to get back together develops, and great wistfulness, in fact tearfulness, at such a prospect, and you would wake up crying, gently.
Someone you pay money to might tell you that is psychologically telling, etc.
Yes and he would be an idiot. Here’s a better example: You are fishing with a fly rod on a dock and hook a very large panfish, monstrously large, trophyesque, and call your serious fishing buddies over to have a look before you release it. They are casual about it because this panfish is not prize game in their view. You somehow wind up at the transom of a running boat with the fish still on, and have to set the rod outside the boat because the fish is hung up and cannot now be properly released, and as you try to climb back over the transom and the outboard motor to free the fish these buddies start the boat forward which will chew up your rod and the fish and quite possibly you once this cartoon develops fully in its improbable way.
These guys are assholes?
Well, yes they are but that is not the major import of the action. There are weird pieces of lumber or dockage or trees or something that keep you from freeing your rod and the fish that are so improbable that these guys cannot be faulted for not comprehending the restrictions you are encountering; you cannot actually comprehend them yourself. There’s a two-by-four across the rear of the boat that keeps you from stepping out to get your rod which is at the fore of the boat.
They are moving the boat forward toward your rod?
Yes, sort of.
How did it get up there?
I know not. It’s a dream.
I’ll say.
This is what I was telling you: it’s a stupid dream. It does not make sense, and it does not make the perfect nonsense a real dream makes. It makes only this stupid-ass sense.
You need to quit having these.
That’s what I’m talking about.
Is it an expensive rod?
Eight or nine hundred dollars for the rig. The fish is more spectacular than any that is actually alive now or in the past. It will be destroyed.
You don’t have to pay me to tell you this but this is a dream borne of depression. That’s all it is.
So what do I do?
No idea. Stay awake.
Good idea.
A man and all his effects.
What?
I was just having an idea: a man and all his effects… is a sad business, you get right down to it. Grave to him, silly to the universe. He can’t get rid of the crap that weighs him down. He cherishes his ditty bag. He needs a house fire, of course, but he also needs a mind fire.
I want to go to the yard sale up the way.
Do you want more shit?
; No.
Then—
I know. But what if there is good shit?
You don’t want more shit.
The last thing I want is more shit, but what if there’s good shit there, and it goes ungotten?
It won’t go ungotten, someone else will get—
Get the good shit, simple as that. Hat up. I am having a vision of old monofilament. That is what I most need today.
I hope they have kittens in a box and you get one.
What if they have, like, possums in a box? Free kittens in one box and “Possum’s $10” in another? That’s what I’m talking about! I am talking about acquiring shit no one in his right mind acquires and paying for it and being troubled by it the rest of your life, moving it from house to house, in this case being put in the hospital by it, and so forth. I am talking about living, my friend.
I wonder if what you are talking about is the kind of lunacy that inspires a man to run for president, when it’s at the other end of the spectrum of affluence.
The man who can’t stand for other people to get the good shit that he doesn’t need but must have lest they have, when he already has money?
Yes. The poor kleptos go to yard sales, the rich run for president, out of the same impulse.
Just hat up, de Tocqueville. That fishing line calls me.
Was that a…what was that?
What?
That flew by.
What flew by?
That is what I am asking.
You are asking what flew by.
Yes.
I saw nothing fly by.
Come on – it was like a condor, blew right through here about six feet high.
Didn’t see it.
Dude, you should have felt it.
Didn’t feel it.
I have a headache.
Take a nap.
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