Bed, Bath & Beyond

Someone's down on their knees like an otherworldly child doing gravestone rubbings right now. In some country's full sunlight. In grasses full of insects meandering and stuttering like human adjectives. Somewhere. Somewhere it's summer or impersonating summer the way a violinist impersonates a glass sliver of culture. I guess I mean a violinist with a recognized orchestra. No, I don't. I want to imagine Antarctica feels like a gorgeous mistake this time of year. Where I write this, it is winter and night. So there it must be summer. What would you do if you lived on a planet that was not a seesaw? Move, I guess, right? Someone is moving the hair around on somebody's forehead. Many bodies are. Some move hair away from a grave to read the gravestone. I mean the hair of the grave, the long grasses. The long untentative grasses of language. It's a good enough reason to wake up, I suppose. The tiny moss infiltrates tiny crystals of granite and the antique name chiseled into it. Probably today this is done by lasers. I mean the engraving. That's why you can decorate your gravestone like a cake. A young boy in his baseball uniform can end up silk-screened icing on a cake or a near photographic image on a gravestone. All you need is a line. Why do we call it an outline? Why do we go one step further? It's still a line. Why have I always wanted to visit Antarctica? What do I expect to find there that I can't see or people can't say on television. That's a stupid thing to say. The clouds for one. The clouds over Antarctica and their vivid colors at sunset are probably worth it. I can just see the dark lilac clouds in my mind's eye, edged in weird charcoal. The clouds lilacking into darkness. I feel like an asshole for adding a "k." I think it's a feeling more than a perception that there are places in that cloud which are tinseling. Probably this is only the eye adjusting itself. To degrees of brightness. Every body must have degrees of brightness to be seen. Contrast. A body can't be all darkness or all brightness or it will be blindness. Because there is a bright blindness and a dark blindness. A body adjusts itself in time using time. The medium is not the message. The medium is the medium. There is no message but the medium. Why does the commutative not work in language sometimes the way it does in mathematics? This is supposed to make sense. Sense is not supposed to pre-exist until it is made. A body is a pile of time you can carry on your back. A child or lover. Playful. An object you're looking at when you're freezing is not the same as that object when you're not. Not freezing. Does that mean objects are not objects? No--just that objects are not objective. The way we pretend sometimes. The whole enterprise of reading anything is based on pretending. I like to pretend to read. Sometimes I do. When a person holds a rose, they often feel stupid. They may pretend to read it. Models are trained to read things like roses, towels, ceiling tile, flooring, penises, medicine, governments, hunger. Non-models sometimes fail to read these things and are shunned. Or they read these things too slowly, too quickly, or with a funny otherworldly accent. The mental health system is a lot like children's books. There is a magnanimous simplification of something usually deemed complex. Think of the way meals are served in such a setting. Whether this is true or whether the mental health system lies about the simplicity nobody seems to really know. The ultimate simplicity (possibly sanity) is when you can see other human beings as almost equivalent to bathroom towels. And still not be mean about it. But some people do get mad. They get quite mad and scream at the bath towel people, the people who are acting like bathroom towels. Polite society is based on the notion that people can treat each other like bath towels and life can still be rewarding and meaningful. If you attack someone for remaining distant and neutral like a bath towel towards you, you risk being committed. Sooner or later people will give you medicines that feel good and you will probably eventually love the bath towel people. You may even wear one of them in the form of a bathrobe. This may make you feel slightly horrible at first, somewhat as though you were an Aztec priest wearing another human being's skin or face. But in time you will probably like the way the soft plush material enfolds you when you lie back in your bed. You will feel accompanied by the kindness of the towel. And then the other towels may feel safe enough to come a little closer to you. And press their strange softness against your skin.