Full Of Busy

True magic inheres in the ordinary, the commonplace. Everything around them is pure miracle. Only petty minds yearn for the supernatural.     Edward Abbey      

I concur. I can’t imagine anything more surreal than witnessing the deconstruction of America. Duchamp’s urinal might be the fitting iconography.  

These days, I spend quality time gazing out the window in the amaze of its miracle. There are enough high trees spared by bulldozers to imagine whose woods these were a hundred years ago when I swung from branches in my loincloth. Imagination is the renewable sanctuary; my unlived or disowned life.

It’s all here, the still-life on the table. I welcome the haphazard. The word itself makes me happy. I have an affinity for a modicum of disarray as if everything is unfinished, caught for a moment in flight on its way to elsewhere.

William Carlos Williams said, No ideas but in things. I would amend that to things in motion, upon which so much depends. The red wheelbarrow is only glazed with rainwater for a few minutes.

Last night I lost my mouse. How could I lose a mouse? It was just in front of me but now gone. Maybe I had dropped and kicked it; I got a flashlight to look under the couch. Nada.

A wise man once said that everything is somewhere. This morning, I tried putting on my shoe but there was no room for my foot. The mouse had found a homeland. I admire its vision and kinetic energy.

In those gangster movies of the 40’s, Bogie or Cagney were sent up the river, taking the rap for another hood who is laying low till the heat’s off. In the next scene they’re planning a prison break and if that fails we see one of them or George Raft walking down that last crooked mile, getting an earful of Jesus on his way to the chair.

I would hope that the notion of flux also applies to myself. I expect to be dead for a long time. Until then I want to evolve. My memoir is a run-on sentence, unpunctuated, a vessel unmoored. Even in my contemplative, sedentary life I would like to be full of busy as Abigail Adams put it.