I do not.
If you look out the window for thirty minutes in France you will see a dog take a shit; in India, a man.
Why would a man capable of or interested in an observation of this caliber think he has a problem?
You have been most helpful to me today, sir.
&
Do you see this hazard of steel appearing—
What is a hazard of steel?
I don’t know. But it appears to recede into infinity, rails of steel or a channel of steel, somewhat like a steel trough, except it is heavy and precisely machined — it is like a giant pistol action the size of a railroad, you might say.
All right. Let’s say I might say that. It is not clear to me why I am saying it or why you are saying it. What about the hazard of steel?
Well, I see it. In my mind.
You see in your mind a railroad-sized pistol action receding out of sight. To the exclusion of all else?
Well, no. I don’t see exclusively the hazard of steel all the time, but when I do see it I will say that at that moment I see nothing else. It fills the screen as it were.
So you don’t see, say, cedar trees and rabbits marching also into infinity beside the perspective of steel.
No. And that is a good word, perspective. It is a perspective and that is what occupies your mind, not the surround, just as in seventh-grade mechanical-drawing class they never had you draw in the parking lot and trees around the building that also I might note seemed poised to recede into space.
So what you have is like a seventh-grade vision of a giant pistol action stretching let us say from New York to Moscow.
Or beyond. The steel looks so polished, so well cut!
Nicely oiled?
Finely oiled!
And when you behold this vision, you are disturbed by it, or—
No! Made completely, utterly content. I love the hazard of steel. I want to work the giant action!
Do you think it tenable that our brains have gone?
Yes I do.
&
Have you had further occasion to view the hazard of steel?
No. It has been replaced by a vision of flowers.
Giant flowers issuing from the giant pistol action?
No. A field of gladiolas. Tended by a blind man. On a three-wheeled ATV. The glads are sold from a jar in a shed by the road on the honor system. The honor system tends to stick in the mind when you see it.
I will never forget seeing a refrigerator full of Orbit beer sold on the honor system at a motel in the Florida Keys. I wish I could recover that moment.
Isn’t it wanting to recover moments that undoes us?
Yes, I suppose that is what undoes us.
How should we seek to not wish to recover moments, then?
I propose two ways: repudiate the recovering of moments as childishness and embrace the covering as it were of the present moment in such a way that the recovery of a moment past seems moot.
It would seem to me if we could effect option two that the repudiation of the recovering of past moments as childish would be moot, so you are really proposing one method.
So be it.
It is simply seize the day, in the way that the day was seized the day you saw an Orbit in a rusty refrigerator on a slab in Pine Key at the Rainbow Motel if it was not the Peace Inn and put twenty-five cents in a cup for it and thought you were in an already passing-away time, and were, but you were seizing that time at that time and were in it and now it stands for its very vigor as the kind of moment cleaner and better than the current dull ones you are not so seizing and enjoying.
Yes. That was a mouthful but I think you have it right.
Have you noticed that everything is leaning a little bit today?
Leaning?
Yes, off-plumb. Maybe it is just me.
Are you dizzy?
No, but I swear that pot right there is hanging not vertical, and those decals you pasted up of that grasshopper are not symmetrical anymore, and, you know, isn’t everything just a bit leaning?
I think you are right.
Should we straighten everything?
I think not. I don’t think us capable, one, but I see no reason to undo the charm of things leaning. Things are finally getting in tune with us.
About time.
Yes. Leave the horse’s mouth alone.
I wish we owned a forklift. Be fun to drive it around and pick impossibly heavy shit up.
&
Is it amazing how fast things break down now?
What things?
Us.
Oh. Yes. But that has, we have, always been breaking down.
That is technically true but when I was twenty and looked like a beautiful girl and beautiful girls would pay attention to me because of it you could not tell I was breaking down.
Well you can tell it now that you look like an old man and will soon look like an old woman.
You are vicious.
Yes. Do you know the original meaning of vicious?
No.
Me either, but I recently read it and it is something quite different from what one is when he tells someone he is an old man soon to look like an old woman.
Probably in the early innings of vicious there was not enough meanness about for old men to be telling old men they would soon look like old women.
&
I recall it: tending to vice. That’s all vicious meant.
Well you don’t tend to vice, you are vicious, a vicious bastard.
I must say we have much improved the word over time.
As we decline the words get better.
That is how it should be. They are our children.
We become old women and the words go skateboarding.
I am down with it. I need a vicious drink today.
I wish we had a live-in bartender.
We should have an entire Court. We are princes.
Yes we are. Just exiled before our time.
I feel like walking in the woods that do not exist and talking birds into sitting on my hand with the promise that I will not hurt them.
I had a dream that someone’s wife visited me in bed.
Anyone’s wife?
No, a particular someone whose name I daren’t mention. I was dreaming in the dream that I was kissing this woman and woke up still within the dream to discover that I really was kissing her. It developed — in three syllables or fewer — that she had been trying to get me to meet her down at the dock but that my prudence did not allow it so she knew the only way to have me was to slip into bed while I was helpless and asleep and have her way, and this alas she had done, she was as proud and bright as Jack Horner. She was facedown in the bed at this point and spread her legs and said, Do you like my apple?
Did you avail?
I took a bite of the apple before it occurred to me I was not free to bite with abandon. Husbing.
Ah, you had the old husbing-still-looks-at-his-wife delusion.
Yes. Well, I was after all in a dream state. And this apple was worthy of inspection, which is why I straight off took a bite.
Why can we not live real lives?
I don’t know.
&
We are done?
It would appear we are.
I have noticed this morning that my shins have grown thin and sharp.
We have bird brains, why not bird legs?
I suppose. Still, when your leg feels like a knife, it is sad and alarming, quietly.
I can accept that.
I want some bread pudding.
Let us locate the best bread pudding within our reach and get on with dying.