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.

The Ballad of the Mountain Oysters.

Thighs scrunching the table leg, as a student swimmer relents to take towards the vista of the waters.

I had put things together thusly, in the interim, as it was and such. It was the edge of the future: I stood on the literal edge of the thing, having flailed and flittered my way through the inscrutable blankness of it.

Conducive psyche put it to me that I could retain only one of each in the same allotment of thought: the feelings, or the memories.

Choose one from this pile, discard the other.

"I watched them rise.

Amphibalence, maybe they call it, see, another linguistic invention, lacking both correctness, provenance--

bereft of time, insufficient in space--

a bonked thumb in the infinitude of one’s peripheral workspace, the indefinence between dreams and reality, the Buddha sitting in the shade mind disconnected from all reality--

The entirety of nature came to life, spanning the SEC, ACC, and partial Sun Belt, and I did not as much sit and watch, but walked “among the rows”, so to speak, between the rows, with that soft sucking sound of flora and fauna aborbing, feeding on the teets of Mother Nature. Watering can in my hand, a Whistler, one does not bespokingly see these things, but attenuation by nature is innate: we feel them from the outer gelatin to the inner pocket of water that pillows the mind. Seasonal Effective Disorder, they call it when one’s natural wiggle is inconvenient for contrived schedules of production, entertainments, love-making in our frisson moderne.

The weather was fine, rising to its pitch more naturally, in gradients that prove aesthetically after-sex-brain-chemistry-stir-illusion, regular, along the southeast seaboard spit.

Plants grew.

The land-locked snapping oysters which we so commonly spot clinging so to our grapevines began to unshell, like snakes shedding skin, and it was not the whim of nature, but instead the turning of the great cog of time, not in its usual fits and starts, tantrums, but in vulgar regularity."

At once, its a sex-stirred happiness of a prosperous season. An oddball glimpse of a world from its tedium to without, and from without to the distorted swirl of tedium. Sagacious flummox that initials its love letter to itself.

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.