Last night at the Vistoso Commerce loop exit on to Oracle Road, I stopped the car and put off the lights. Dozens of small fires crept down the ridges of the Catalinas. It seemed a fitting salute to the July Fourth Holiday several days away. This morning the gullies and ravines that lead down to the foothills and then to Oracle Road were filled with smoke, as if a giant corncob pipe was puffing out blasts. The crests from about 3 to 4 miles away seemed charred, like burnt popcorn. The heat today was intense even in the morning hours and I came home after running a few errands to pay bills. Mt. Lemmon’s fire, we are told, is now contained. Of course, Mt. Lemmon hasn’t a care in the world. The only analogue I have for it is cutting hair; imagine if we felt that shearing. I view the universe as unfeeling as scissored tresses, a space-time continuum of monstrous indifference. I see no meaning to it all, which only serves me to become more vigilant with my fellow sentient fools as they run to and fro, establishing religions, creating systems, rule-making, and all the idiocies of the human race.
I imagine societal efforts are very much like putty-filler. We continue to fill in holes in ourselves and our communities as if this effort counts. It does not. We are busy little bees who can’t let it be, no pun intended. It took some time before the Beatles “Let It be,” got through our sullen and stubborn minds, if it ever did. We just can’t resist tinkering with others, ourselves and the planet. Madonna, for one, continually changes from one video to another; by chance last night I saw her in the latest disguise. A question — doesn’t she really have a boy’s musculature with a face-shifting attractiveness? A thousand years hence, as we flip through images of this time, she will remind us of the pages in comic books of yore, the pages we never read, the filler between stories, the pages that advertised come-ons to the adolescent mind. Poor Madona, curbside detritus. And don’t get me on to Jennifer Lopez — the rear end that changed the world in 10 days. What would Lenin have given for a ride on that Ninotchka? She is a body part, inanimate, like Ulysses’s sirens, calling out to inanimates in general.
I scurry about, irascible soul that I am. I mumble and grumble to myself. I don’t like most people. I am quiet when I have to be. I don’t aggress others. I am not a socializer. I am affabe, but not too mucyh so that I kiss up. I don’t like others who kiss up. I am in a constant state of dislike — I find that “healthy,” for i see through, at times, the bullshit we call human interaction. I have an enormous crap detector behind my eyes. I listen well. And then I really listen, depending on the the person before me, mensch, schmuck, jerk, fool, brown-noser or nincompoop. Good people I attend to.
This bristling affect, this edgy persona, this near nastiness is how I greet the world. I couldn’t care a whit about its history. I use to. I see no point to that now. It is how I manage myself and the world. I couldn’t about whether or not it gets in my “way,” or makes life difficult for me — and others, often kin. It is not an orneriness wanting to remain ornery. I think it is much more. It is my kettle of fish. An octopus spits out ink. I spit out this self. I could never entirely tease out its roots, or reduce it to a pablum of insights and interpretations. It is not reductive.
Simply said, I have come into this persona as a bud enters into bloom. Unplanned, without design, evolving and evolved, my puny efforts to canalize its positive and negative features have led only to cosmetic affects. Like oil and vinegar in a cruet, after awhile, they precipitate out and rest one liquid upon another. The most we can do in life is to vigorously shake the cruet, from time to time, to integrate the flavors; but who are we kidding? After decades we precipitate out again — look at the infant and the child: fast forward 60 years. Same child in the same adult. All that growing and human effort for nought. We are much like fields of grain, more imposing as a group fluorishing than as an individual head of grain. And, ultimately, all this grain becomes a box of rice krispies.
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