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Michael considered fate at 18:55   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

It's something about August, something about the hot bright swelter I guess, that sends me into a weird mentally-unstable reverie. The quiet of a summer day, the woosh of leaves dancing in the breeze, the BUZZzzzzzz of cicadas sitting amid the shade trees as if to say "how about this heat?".

It's within these days of August that the mental stew begins to boil and weird thoughts crop up out of nowhere like bad daydreams, swimming around in the humidity and making ugly faces at you. It's uncontrollable in the way the weather is uncontrollable and the only real escape is - BANG - an intense shaft of broken and crooked light piercing through the magmatic soup of the mind.



In one instant it is thick, slow, and pasty; the neurons firing in spiritual vapidity, each impulse like a letter carried by a wayward postman, a drinker perhaps whose second chance on the job has come and gone and only the day's deliveries remain between him and his government checks. He tosses the envelopes helter-skelter, haphazardly into front yards and onto porches. He's stumbling and trying to remember his name, his place, where he belongs and why he's carrying a bag full of other people's bad news.

A split second later, after the BANG of coruscating brightness but before the BOOM of rumbling thunder knocks the old lady off her rocker and sends her darning needles flying, there is a quiet calmness - as if all of the stew, that quagmire of gumbo-brewing jambalaya mental mud, has been zapped out of existence by the pure electricity of the moment, as if the heat and the humidity came together to scheme against the people and uncover the truth - that everything was a farce, a fake facet of the imagination. In that brief moment shams are confessed. Conspiracies are revealed. The mind becomes - if only for that infintesimal instant - like a celestial cloud of mini-matter, strands of silkish platonic plasma, a webbish gossamer floating on a boundless sea. Everywhere there is silence, to the ends of the oceans of time and back again; not a single sound wave ripples.



Then from nothing comes something; a giant invisible rubberband, having been stretched so far to it's limits that it literally doesn't exist anymore, is released and emancipated from it's rack-like torture. It comes rushing back to itself, a tsunami of realization. Self, and thus it's everlasting bedfellow self-loathing, return to the center, forced into heavy embrace by the shear power of a giant mental thunderclap crackling through the night sky (it's not night, but the lightening blinds the eye to the relative dimness of the little star we call the sun).

Beneath the old uneven boards of the front porch, underneath a ball of yarn partly unravelled and a spinster stretched out in repose, sits a nettlish old dog named Days blinking out through cataracts into the now pouring rain. Torrents of water rush down the roof and into the gutters, storming out the ends, through the air in perfectly mathematical arches, into deep grass-lined puddles - ethereal things that only August sees. His paws are crossed and his snout, damp with the thickness of the air, twitches back and forth. In his giant sagging maw he slowly chews a long thick envelope on front of which is printed: Congratulations, you may have just win $1 Million Dollars.