Wine (Part XV)

Found self coming down that untrodden street with a milk crate in your hand, spinning it to cast its reticulated shadow onto the pavement, some sort of diamond drill into the darkness of the night,. Diamond drills into that empty, sucking chest-wound feeling. Stopped by the King of Kensington to ask for guidance, but the homeless guy sleeping on the bench kwpt me walking. Bag laden with books I somehow got for free; laden with heacy iced green tea to ward off the heat wave--it didn't work. Neither did masonic symbols, mandalas, mantras, Gregorian chants, drum circles, hip-hop beats. Tried to ward off the heat with alcohol. Tried absinthe: by a curious twist of irony learned that the active ingredient in absinthe has the same biological effects as the drug I administer to my lab mice. Curious Buddhist thought: see how we're connected. All you have to make is an imaginative/observational leap. We can't imagine the phylogeny that ties all living things on the planet, but we can observe. And what we can't observe, we imagine. (By the way, in high enough doses absinthe has hallucinogenic properties. But not what I had.)

Laughter in the aisles at improbabilities. Standing in detergent aisle, friend says "I can't eat this!", and points to a detergent box labelled "duck". It was funner at the time. (Backyard green tree cemetery dawns.)

Received the most terrifying fortune cookie imaginable: "be prepared for the truth". Laughed hearty for a long time, but it was just a defence mechanism. I wanted to ask the King of Kensington that.

(Prisoner of Metropolis.) Waited in line for hot coffee. Want to go see a book launch and mingle with literati. Our new hotel; our agent of gentrification. I live in clutter because I choose to. Out of the clutter comes mind-clutter. But clutter also contains so many raw materials. True randomness does not exist: I have to believe we can tell a causal story on some level. Give up. This is the gloaming.

Consider: "I am for those that have never been master'd, / For men and women whose tempers have never been master'd, / For those whom laws, theories, conventions, can never master."