Journeyman centenarian, your
squadron of sheep hurlers
begged you to curdle off the cliff
while dangling circumlindrically–
as though in a play.
No such luck.
Life is a raised platform,
gawking peanut gallery
all around, over-adorned yaps
temporarily agape
toward a permanent problem.
The plight of the talented
is wasted on the non-observant.
A charming, alarming chili bit of nonsense fried my circuits for the latest of the schnitzengruben factors, not at all unlike the sleaze you’d unravel with a long hard look at the compact disc (spectrum and all).
I helped an old lady off the bus, and ever since, people are just lumps of shit doing the bare minimum whenever possible at the expense of others. I’ve noticed that I tend to do the opposite (at the peril of tooting my own horn), where I neglect myself and only give my “authentic person” to people I don’t know a lick about. And then I turn around and neglect the needs of anyone who dared take the time to develop a rapport with this here sad sack.
All I know is this: there are ideas and there are ideals. Ideals may be met through the exploration of ideas, and ideas may only be found as a passenger of an old freight train (as it rumbles its way across the plains).
Facile fabrication comes with half-price wine and a half-decent idea of what it means to be a cut-rate pilgrim on the eve of the seventh tardigrade.
So now, Jimber Unfletching Libberdijibbet (that’s his stage name) has a bone to pick with the absurd nature of his very existence on this here rock orbiting a mid-grade star of no particular distinction. For one: how could his sorry-ass soul have been picked to inhabit a corporeal manifestation of this godforsaken planet? His mind simply wasn’t malleable enough to adapt to such mental calisthenics, even if said activities only constituted a sixteenth of one morning each second Thursday after waterobics.
He needed a tutor of sorts to escort him down the row of unconcerned minds, so he could become one of those most-enviable kinds of folks who look so cool that their general demeanor forces them to do everything but justify the wherewithal that led the to cultivate such a persona in the first place.
But, after all, we happen to inhabit an age of severe impressionology. I can see I may have lost you on that last one. It’s essentially a myriad of minuscule multiplicities as seen through the eyes of numerous (some would say innumerable) individuals, wherein people tend to default toward the middle of the pack so as to avoid embarrassing themselves in front of those in the know.
I know.
I’m gonna let this here sandwich–tuna
and potato on marble rye–cool
on the windowsill for a minute (or
more likely three), just like
my little orphan auntie used to do
back when the regenerative stillborn
recollections astonished even the staunchest
followers of the occult (and lesser occult-like
activities cut from a quite-similar cloth (or suitable
cloth-like substance that may adequately demonstrate
the tensile strength of a natural fiber (cotton
would be the fairest readymade comparison))).
Cheatersley Everington has never had much reason to spout drivel from the tip of his dorsal fin, mainly because he never inherited one of those peculiar things from his most recent mammalian ancestry. Perhaps a few hundred million years ago he would have still had a bit of a vestige from where he needed to propel himself through the water in a somewhat graceful way, but these days it would be silly to expect such an outdated mode of transport to have any trace elements remaining. But with all that aside, Cheatersley never made much of a fuss about the dorsal shortage. He would be the first one to tell you that such science fiction elements hold no significance in his day-to-day existence. In fact, he exists during a time in the “modern” human epoch when science fiction is not a term that people bandy about. He has been afforded a blissful existence of technological and historical ignorance simply because he happened to strap on his feed bag in what we commonly call the 19th Century. Lucky duck, basking in a world of intellectual stagnation and limited upward mobility (well, until he dies of dysentery, at least).
Nothing like total collapse of an ancient civilization to completely ruin your day–unless that’s just your business as a mercenary of the righteous lord of all things merry-go-round (circular logic and all, you see). I would have bought a nice cup or two of java if it weren’t for the beast of the west constantly sneaking up behind me and issuing edicts in the name of all things cylindrical.
This is truly a sneak peek of the upcoming legacy stalling that probably would have burnt out my retinas if it hadn’t been for that egregious charm manipulator staining everything they touch with naiveté. But if it weren’t for that unfortunate fabrication of logic, I wouldn’t be standing before you here today. We take our small victories wherever we can get them.
True story, folks. I only have several things to say at any given point, and in order to figure out which–if any–to engage in for the sake of our fallen ancestors (be their downfalls organic or orchestrated), I’m going to need to understand the frequency of my more lucrative brain farts. Only then will I contemplate counteracting the absurd impacts of ancient inebriation in relation to our contemporary neighborhood ecology. Ya dig?
But brain farts have nothing to do with our current predicament. We need to scrape down to the root of the issue before we can even think of attempting an exclusionary rift in downtown traffic patterns, and until you take this topic seriously, I’m going to have to cut you off. six tequila shots is probably enough anyway, wouldn’t you say?
Curatives of antiquity are now more necessary than ever before. We–the re-appropriated and inexplicably-gifted tree apes–think that through modernity (what a troublesome word) we have relegated the works of our ancestors to the obscure corners of the proverbial curio shop, when we have in fact abandoned the principles that caused our species to rise out of our loathsome bed of mud and shit in the first place.
Ergo, the abandonment of these principles will ultimately result in our return to the mud and shit (but hopefully not all the way back to the trees). We must be ever vigilant in the observance of the works of our world’s remaining unbroken cultures. It has been made abundantly obvious that these peoples have maintained their distinct civilizations through adherence to natural laws and at least an attempt to maintain a semblance of harmony.
Exhibit A: The Pine Box of Shortitude
Any time a recipe, technique or method becomes too effective for anyone to emulate without said act becoming an unbearable faux pas, the elders of the community must combine forces to capture its most essential components, record them into an intelligible (tangible) script and carefully lock it away in what has come to be known as, you guessed it, The Pine Box of Shortitude.
Why pine– Longleaf Pine, to be more specific? Its connection to dinosaur days and its subsequent shortage of specimens due to a variety of human-studded reasons are just two important takeaways. When the box was originally crafted, Longleaf Pine were abundant across the entire landscape. The progenitors of this curatorial tradition really could not have predicted such a significant shortage within the span of just a few generations, but as time passed and the omens became more clear, the box’s preservation inevitably became a top priority not only for its contents, but the vessel itself.
Hopefully this particular artifact will shed some light on how dire a situation this has become, where humans appear to have become at odds with the natural progression of this planet’s ecology. And if not? Eh, fuck it.
WHARVED 