The Number 5

The small girl has a narrow face, like her father. She plays on the sidewalk in a place that cannot be determined without some local knowledge of the streets. She is blonde, covered to her waist. She is six.

I love cement, she says. I love playing, she says.

She pulls out chalk and begins decorating the sidewalk with squares and numbers that begin to form mountains of jumbled meanings.

A woman arrives; she is heavily decorated with tattoos (an owl, a little boy, a frowning face, a happy face) – around thirty years old. She has a shaved hair – dark stubble is peppered along her scalp. She has scars that only a very astute observer would notice – they litter her face. They are places that one sprouted piercings.

The woman says: Hello there, Princess.

Shyly, not looking up from her chalk drawing, the girl: Hi.

Are you having fun?

Uh-huh.

 Do you play out here often, the woman says, a piercing smile at the back of the girl’s head.

I love playing, the girl says.

I use to play out here.

The girl looks up: Really? My daddy did too.

The woman: Oh yes, all the time. Played. Can I draw?

The girl lets the woman help her draw, both of them on their knees making yellow and red numbers inside messy shapes and forms.

            Did you know my daddy? asks the girl.

            Yes, I knew your daddy. Oh yes.

            Hah! The girl laughs.

            Me and your daddy played all the time.

            Hah! The girl laughs. 

            They continue drawing, but the woman seems to pause as she talks: We played all the time. Hop skotch and running behind the house. Hide and seek in the bushes out back. Hide away in the coat closet.  We played all the time. Know what I mean?

            Wow, says the girl.

            We played all the time. Hah! Know what I mean?   

The girl says: Yup. Played all the time.

            Haha, the woman says.

            Haha, the girl says.

            Want to play then? Asks the woman.

            Oh yes. Let’s play.

            They play hopscotch on the sidewalk outside.

Comfort #32 - Circles

Make sure circles still exist. Holes in doors are a reliable and valid method for making certain this staple of shape remains stable. In the morning one also benefits from a glimpse of what lies outside, seeing some malshaped trees and a street -- maybe a few kids waiting on a school bus. And pull back -- real slow, one step, two. Consider rabbit holes ( refer to Comfort #42) and spy glasses and spectacles, consider the spatial form of physical relationships (refer to Comfort #932), european fountains in the center of Baroque squares -- think about the children and their noggins (such strange children, actually, that only sever the legs from their animal crackers, butchering them until they form nothing but savaged, chewed circles.).  

            Directions on Laughing Feet

Tribals believed that insanity was merely an evil spirit attacking one of their own to fulfill evil spirit schemes. They would cure the possessed by drilling holes in the heads of the afflicted or setting them on fire or wildly beating upon them. This is one of many reasons (wide spread accounts of capitalism being another) that humans as a species abandoned the tribal model of living.

            Today, insanity is a mental state more easily accessed. Though you may be in your vacant dwelling waiting on a spirit to forcibly inhabit your body, one may find insanity by merely walking down the street. Try the following exercise: begin by leaving your home -- be it an apartment, mud hut, dorm room (in descending order from most desirable to least).  

As you walk down the sidewalk stare at the passersby. No, no. Not up there. Forget the pierced faces, the neon rainbow Ipods, and the bosoms of women. Instead, note their feet. Try to find a human that lands with their weight on the front of their feet. The longer you watch, and the longer you try to find the elusive front foot walking human, the deeper you sink into a bog of drool and babble.

If feet scare you (as they do I), try another method. As you bore of the sidewalk take a load off at the nearest friend’s apartment. How you explain, coerce, or otherwise bribe a friend to let you in, I cannot say. Drugs such as Spanish Fly may be suitable.

In the Trappist monk tradition (famously named after their method of using bear traps to find converts) there is a meditation that requires a great deal of concentration, caffeine, and stamina. It is so difficult, many cannot accomplish it. To begin, do the following:

Sit on your bum so that you and your friends face each other.

Take a deep breath.

Say something funny – a line from some sitcom, a discussion on the meaning of life, or mention your favorite Tragedy.

Everyone should be laughing, because you’re a funny person. Now, continue laughing. In fact, do not stop laughing. Ever. You should aim for duration in this exercise. Try for five minutes to start, though ten or twenty should be the aim.

As you watch the faces of your friends in laughter, and realize you too are laughing, the physical world begins to melt. You should see the border between mental well-being and ‘I need a diaper’ crazy before too long.

If you are still sane after the laughter dies, find a group of people that claim to be hippies (though the real hippies from the 60's all became wealthy businessmen). Converse kindly. When they sigh and say they wish everyone would live like the original humans, in peace and harmony with nature begin to argue. This will, in fact, drive you crazy. Tell them that frisbees and pot and free love did not exist. That peace did, in truth, not exist. "They ate each others fucking faces! They were tribals! Did you know about that? They hated each other! Drank blood!" you will say.

This, however, is not entirely insane.

They Were Protesting Something

And when the people go home the streets are marked with litter and half eaten fries and spit and broken condoms and peace graffiti and fuck the war pledges and a pair of shoes on a traffic light and abandoned flowers and broken signs and someones burnt panties hanging from a bush and an empty bottle of Jack and very little else.

But I suspose some of less distracted people stare at the gutters of mess and wish it would be something more tangible.

terrible poetry explains the Birth of Stars

(You gave me a poem, I should explain similarly)

first a million suns in your right eye

                        (i only focus on one at a time)

                        perhaps those suns incubate the stellar

                        perhaps they plant dusty seeds

                        perhaps

                             even candles and pollen

wine

                        the weight of your’s against mine                 

windows cracked in winter and words

                                                lips can’t quite produce syllables for -- yet:

none of these declare the birth of the stars

                        and only after you leave, the candled suns melt white, hard rivers

                                                and i wake to the earth sun, and revel the birth

of a fractured universe, constellations and individual stars on blankets

                        and the mysterious cosmos on my clothes and skin

though the arcane birth is not hard to attribute

to glitter from your dress – the soft remnants you leave behind

                        encourage stars to ignite

 

 When you go back... dance a little

Even if it's badly...

You can still laugh....

Because those other kids in Elementary School use to cream you at hopskotch...  nine year old punks.