Picture Stand

Alone with myself for the most part of the day going on three years now.  Recalling memories more than making them.

This morning, I hang in mid-air, my tinnitus acting like an antigravity medium or viscous fluid with me colloidally suspended.

I remember, because of an audiocassette tape labelled "POWER DIVISION SALES PRESENTATION (c) 1983," the summer I visited Abraham Lincoln's law office in Springfield, IL, with future lawyer Rodney Pillsbury; walked alone through Hannibal, Missouri, home of memories belonging to Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens.

Other names: Og Mandino, Dave Dean and Zig Ziglar.  Nashville.  Iowa.  St. Louis.

Farm fields.  Subdivisions.  Rivers.  Towns.  A flat tire.  Sleeping in basements or attics to save money.  Killing a jackrabbit with my car.

Lonely elderly ladies wanting to talk for hours about their dogs or African violets.

Country roads.  No.  Closed door.  No.  No soliciting.  Not interested.  We don't take kindly to strangers in these parts.

These memories come back to me through my brain, I suppose.  I don't think muscle memory recalls walking door-to-door in the summer heat, my jaws clacking while I recited a sales pitch in hopes of getting a person interested in a two-volume "encyclopedia."

I'm getting older, my mental dictionary growing yet shrinking, suddenly realising that I meant "droves," not "troves," in a previous blog entry (although troves gave the sentence another meaning just as interesting).

And I had such high hopes for "Inception," expecting more than "Jacob's Ladder II."  Maybe we need another Ring Cycle from a great composer/director to tell all there is to tell in the telling.

If you told me that the conservative right-wing political movement popular in my part of the world was led in part by a woman who quit her high-profile political job to pursue a selfish career in public speaking and has a daughter who conceived a child out of wedlock, I'd think I was in some sort of Inception deception, that's for sure.

And this is the real world, right?

High drama.  Low-brow comedy.  We...

I remind myself to say I don't know anything.  I am a robot whose only function is to encourage us to get a small population of our re-engineered species off the planet.

Just because reality appears to beat any comedian in acting out a great farce doesn't mean I should write skits for the sideshow acts, does it?

If I already know what's going to happen next, then anything I do or say should not have an effect on the outcome.  But I know that's not true.  The world isn't draining the U.S. of its resources in order to drive it into a downward-spiralling depression - this country's economic input/output is essential to global commerce, is it not?  Surely we're past the days of national-level revenge, when the new bullies on the block got to push has-beens around for fun and increased earnings?

My colleagues tell me to be quiet, that I talk too much.  Their investments are much more important than my humorous musings.

I don't know what to say.  I wanted to say that I value the idea of freedom that this country once represented.  But if a court of judges in our country can declare that only the rich have the right to privacy in their own yard/driveway, then where can I turn to declare our species has the natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?

This is no longer my country.  It was taken over by conspiracy theorists and overzealous defenders against global terrorism long ago.  J. Edgar Hoover would be proud.  Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin not so much.

Why work my brain over to discover new ways to combine words if we assign corporations and governments the right to control our societies?  What happened to the right of the individual, innocent until proven guilty and all the other ideals handed to me in my youth?  Why my struggle to defend our species against ourselves for little or no reason, a hand trowel trying to hold back a tsunami wave?  Why not just hand over my whole body to be plugged into the "anything you say, I'll do" machine and get it over with?

I'm tired.  I'm older in thought than I thought possible.  I live only in this moment and this moment is so twisted out of shape, I'm afraid I can't find my way out.

Now that's comedy worth writing, an endless loop of endless loops of improbable contradictions, expressed not so much visually but in all states of energy at once in a single moment, revealing the levels that my colleagues don't think the mass-hypnotised masses are ready to see yet.

I wonder if this audiocassette tape still works.  Maybe there's a worthwhile message in it that I've forgotten.