The Urban Soup (Part XI)

What have we here? We have a table steeped in lore. We have ruts in the ancient wood which I suspect was ripped out of an old-growth forest by shirtless men with bronzed backs in some forgotten unhygienic before-time. These ruts which were made by nervous fingers tapping, and frightened nails clawing, and bored forks wandering and erosion from spilled coffee or tea or chai or water or molasses. I am here; here where I drink the coffee; here where I read radical philosophical theses. Here where at the next table people not much younger than me are planning a culture jam of the soulless capitalist machine. I was reading but now I am using conversation as an excuse to powerslack. I want to talk to everyone but instead I am talking to one of my doppelgangers, except this one has not been to class in three weeks; he has circled and hummed and wandered the entire time; he has wept and snickered his way through books of poetry; he has taught himself the violin and the tarot cards. Next to him is the firghtened puppy barista, fretting yet resigned about her three jobs or full schedule or ADHD brother. We are rapidly becoming wells of negativity with modern-day insta-critiques of society, which usually begin with horrible shallow role-inculcation during high school, which proceed through howling at the moon un some pagan ritual where the totem pole is given its mystical power by rubbing it with moss soaked with the menstrual blood of the coven, right through the awful first years of university lecture halls where taxonomically pulsating passion is exhausted by syllabi that rain on our heads for a decade, by cover letters which are verbal equivalents of a smile permanently fixed by an adminsitration of the botulinium toxin. We will talk that day of the most interesting people who will never tell you anything iteresting, of stand-offish sidewalk encounters, of the ghettos of downtown Toronto and of the ignorance. My god, the ignorance. I would like to tell these people what I read about mindfulness meditation and how it differs from concentrative or transcendental meditation, but I cannot since they are things I have not practiced, and I am in no mood to liberally sprinkle snake oil onto the canyons on the table. We will talk of pill addictions and pill recreations, we will talk of children playing the cello on a sunny meadow; we will talk about awareness and consciousness-building, and I will interject to mention sight without awareness and how folk psychology and its conceptial framewwork for the mind is stupid and evil. And we will continue to talk, the shaggy-haired devil pisqueak, the barista and I. And the two of them will touch each other and connect via synapses through their skin while their inert words talk of alienation. Tonight they will end up panting and sweating together in either of their grimy beds. They will not know it, but their rapid exit will give me an idea for the beginning of the essay I should have been researching, and I will jot it down on a cocktail napkin that will fortuitously blow across the rutted table.

Consider: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."