Thursday, October 9, 2008

Sublime Hilarity (Stream Of Consciousness)

We fill up pages and time litters the sidewalks of our Eden. The art of procrastination is on display, naked like the wilted leaf on the path to nowhere. You might get lucky enough for half a second to realize you are nothing. The platitudes and admonitions may be exposed to the light and evaporate like condensation from a can of cold brew. You might find yourself upon a precipice and then again, you might have the good fortune of walking through the valley of the shadow of death in nothing more than your underpants and a pair of cheap sunglasses. You might realize you are Don Quixote and those windmills are real smart asses. The stars poke through the black canvas one by one…are they laughing at you? More importantly, are you laughing at them? Humor lurks behind every rotting corpse. That may offend you. If you let your thoughts just go where they will, you just might offend yourself. This is life and there are no sidelines to sit on. Better to find that out the easy way than to have the teacher catch you sleeping and embarrass you in front of the class. We can sift through this charade of plastic pink flamingos together or you can go it alone. It’s not hard to see if you would only remove the metal bucket from your head. It will be much easier to sleep when it’s not there for other people to bang on with their wooden spoons. It’s not so funny now is it? Wrong. It’s funnier now than ever. You’re clever. So am I but what good has that done either of us? We both piss into the same wind and the wind gets the last laugh. Ah, if only the wind could be bottled up and sold at convenience stores or taken with bread and wine on communion Sunday. Contemplate. Meditate. But don’t procrastinate. I can say it with a straight face but that’s about it. If we only knew, we’d be laughing right now too. Two stars might collide but that would be less significant than either of us feeling the vibe. I can dig it. I can roll with it. I’m willing to let the sand slide through my fingertips and down into the trembling Earth, with all it’s wanton hypocrisy, with all it’s perfunctory grace. If it were any more graceful, surely one of us would have dissolved into a beam of sunshine by now and confused the hell out of the peanut gallery. Shhhh.. .Can you hear that? Dead ass silence dishing out wisdom for free. Go ahead, take a peek out the window. The moon ain’t countin’ no age. The flowers still bloom when the stock market crashes. You might Botox that expanse between what you wanna see and reality but…that shit’s just poison. You’d do far better by tying a rope to one leg and hanging upside down from a towering tree in an invisible forest. The world only has any hope of making sense when seen upside down. So go on ahead. Climb up that tree and tie the knot good. You’re gonna be there awhile. Screw the neighbors. They only give you bad looks because you mirror their own inanity back to them. It’s like that when the circus comes to town and you are the freak show.

4 comments:

notamobster said...

Ben - is that ruminating??? whatever it is, you're amazing at it. I'll be glad when the election is over, so you can do more of this. Nice work.

Ben There said...

Hi Nota -

I don't know what this is. Thank you for the kind words though. When I was in school I was persuaded to take creative writing by my English teacher. There was this exercise called steam of consciousness where you would put your pen down and just start writing and you couldn't stop for fifteen minutes or whatever. That's all I did here. I'm surprised it was coherent at all. Reading back over it does make me grin.

I see that you've met Mrs. Ben There...

Anonymous said...

Ben,

What kind of rope works best and how high must he tree be?

Z

Ben There said...

Hi Z,

Thanks for stopping by. This is the kind of stuff I write when I'm not getting enough oxygen flow to my brain.