Ulysses, Dudley, Roy, and the storebrand Buddha.

Come, mkl, let us tell each other such pretty little lies…..

“That woman in the belly shirt with the SNAP card is gonna be snake food” he said, in the roar of the “wall of Marshalls”, 100-watt x1’s, in the little shop. He sat like the American Buddha, implacable, intractable, slope-shouldered like an old soda machine, with a pie face to accompany that, and staring button eyes: an American Buddha would indeed look like some commercial product, something with brand identity and all of the rubbarb of the pitchmen: in the way of common tropes of Santa with a soda, the Teddy Bear, or the plethora of eponyms.

The other man was trying to roll his eyes without being too apparent. Meanwhile, Dudley Wong, the Coca-Cola Vermont non-storebrand Buddha, picked up a stack of materials from his countertop: sheet music and hardback books with corroded, decaying pages. Something of Gospel, concert band, Joseph Heller’s contempt for the defending freedom and liberty, and Ulysses, oddly enough.

Roy Early let the edges of his mouth, the tracings of the edges of the lips, curl slightly, glaring blankly across the store.

It was spirit-gummed to the sidewall of his mind that, in his perceptual gloom, he had appraised matters in his mind, and the barrel of the derisive wasting fish, that stench, was wafting now in the direction of Dudley Wong. Meanwhile, Wong was meandering in his own empty musings, watching the lady outside, the real estate advertisements, an abandoned car, and other piddles and diddles of the “low commerical” zone. Analysis bore-out, even without hard scrutiny, that it was wrong to train his balsa-wood maze of internal anxiety on Wong.

A rustle, Dudley had a crumpled list in his fingers, and for all Roy could see, his friend was looking at the list, not reading the list, but looking at it, like running through the very fact that there was a list, bemusedly, as if it were monumental in itself, to have last in the little rented building among the transient scraps sandwiched in every corner in the thing. It was but a jot and a tittle among the other: portrait of a prospective grocery clerk hunting management.

After laying plain her various varying reasons, she shined a pickle and a pook, a duhrizzle and an exhortation.

Bikini, tennis shoes, and the458 from Instagram.

How rapidly we chain ourselves to those self-defeating causes, impossibilities, improbabilities, the boulder that Sisyphus essentially stood behind, straining his back.  Imperatives like the bikini and tennis shoes Nicole in the Countach, the 458 on Infragram.

Faulknerian self-defeatism, Chekov's walk hoping its only self-defeatist and a universe fixedly unfurls its intuition that dust is dust, and the haunted house door handles hourglass themselves into the creep of rust, Viktor Frankl.

Was it that Sisyphus pushed the stone, or was it that he simply prevented the stone's natural declination, in the crushing of him?  Was it that he forsook happiness?

In my notes, I see this:

I done seen, driving around through a thin haze of lingering pine smoke, a buzzard eating a tiresmushed snake.  And i thought, "hello, America."

I approached, and the carrion trevailed the perpendicular, away from the blacktop towards the volunteer oaks, through the slight menthol of the pine smoke.

I heard a kitten in the bushes, despondent, and i was drinking in the experience, before the realization hit me that is was crass, high-minded abandonment, but i could not, should not, and would not, be all places at once.

A stranger along the tarmac passage seemed to have soon after taken up the poor creature, and i could then only beniggle over the panaroma of life, about.

I talked to the mountain woman at walmart, concerned of her well being, her set of mind and predicament of personhood; but would of my bent?  What of my own positioning along the whoosh of toilet flush: the vitreous, life, abundant and varied, and the puzzle piece only speaking to me in fragments, and in fits and starts at that; life has not changed, but only keeps going, whispering to those who would hear, a shoebox diarama of larger truths that only flit near the edges of the senses.