WHARVED

Cycle

It’s become apparent that Gulliver lacks the drive to make things interesting, whether it’s through turtledove acquaintanceships or Ivy League aggressiveness. He’s recently put a block on all things ego-driven, and will be the first to admit that he has no goal to get anywhere at any speed.

“I do like food, ya gotta eat, but I don’t dare don the chef’s hat, likely never will unless I’ve begun to see taking actions as necessary, freeing me from my lonesome days of kibble cutting, sandwich clumping and marble roasting–all done in my head without any consequences. I reckon my days of imagined cattle prodding, plateau scraping, griffin pummeling, take-out ordering and helmet wearing are also numbered, now that I don’t care to differentiate arbitrary actions and images from one another. Sitting in meditation for the rest of my life sounds good enough for a fella like me, yessiree. That is, at least, until I tire of the whole arrangement and need to unleash my convoluted persona on the world again.”

The merciless cycle of ego-driven to ascetic and back again eats away at Gulliver at least three times a day, typically while eating processed foods.

Monument

Standing never posed a problem until it became the only option for Gilligan. Granted, this is a self-imposed problem; he could sit any time. But then he would lose his discipline and just sit all day every day until he sees no reason to stand anymore. No matter how this conundrum shakes out, he can only be certain that his all-or-nothing attitude is hereditary, and nothing he does can change that. Predisposition to heart disease, addictive behavior, snoring and the fear of dinosaurs, heights, children, open water, dandruff and old mattresses have crippled him, leaving a man with less purpose than a satiated hyena. There’s simply nothing left to be done, so Gilligan stands still under the canopy of a locust tree, a monument to the dangers of doing pretty much anything else.

Laughable

What’s the plan of attack here if we wish not to attack anyone? Can we still call it a plan of attack? We won’t even be attacking a concept or a goal, violence in all forms is laughable. On that front, I’m surprised I haven’t seen a circus where the clowns just attack each other to appease the masses of demanding attendees. There are probably circuses just like that in the big ol’ world, I just haven’t seen any of them. In fact, I haven’t seen a circus at all in the past 14 years. I haven’t been purposely avoiding them, it’s just easy to choose not to frequent that type of business if the topic’s never broached by, say, a whimsical uncle who just flew into town from Tegucigalpa, looking to blow off some steam with popcorn and clown-on-clown violence during an evening he’ll come to forget after a year or two. Wayward uncle Billy would enjoy three robust cigars before night’s end as he pines for the days before reality television, sight gag after sight gag coming to fruition before our eyes. The roughhousing clowns would visibly retain their composure with the latest sweatproof makeup, advertised to last twelve hours under even the hottest spotlights, a 100% money back guarantee if not completely satisfied.

CVIII

Fire lit by tonsillitis
stalls the candlestick vendor.
This is a flame
that must be conquered
with a knife,
non-invasive procedures
simply won’t cut it.

Go under and collect
anesthesia-fueled dreams
that won’t be remembered
until a moment
in another dreaming state
(which will also be forgotten
until consciousness melds with chaos
and uploads all of life’s raw data
to the infinite abyss, images
blurring with thoughts and emotions
while sounds and textures follow suit
in an infinitely-faceted patchwork).

CVII

Picture a rogue squadron of down-filled pencil pushers coordinating a squalid attempt at what they believe to be a most fertile salad dressing, but what we know to be a seasonal jaunt through the woods in search of pine cones shaped like Abe Lincoln. Gettysburg hasn’t been relevant for some time now, but that doesn’t stop our friends from trudging through the underbrush and raising alarms every time they see leaves in clumps of three.

They know not what makes a salad dressing more fertile than any other, and they don’t even claim to assume what constitutes your average dressing, fertile or barren. They simply know that their amalgamation has yet to be approved by any regulatory body and they’re just going by the seat of their pants and trusting that their instincts will lead them down the tastiest road, be it nutritious or otherwise.

A faction of our dressing doers have found it more pertinent to skate through the town square with cheese in their britches, convinced that dressing has no bearing on the legitimacy of a salad. Their position stokes outrage amongst their peers; how could a salad be considered legitimate in this world if it hasn’t been coated in oily goodness? The two camps are at odds with one another, and the argument won’t be settled until the blood of the innocent flows through the streets.

CVI

The freeloading, lance tossing, hand jiving, bank robbing, heavy lifting, double dipping, chain smoking, dry heaving and life-living individual spent his time in the service of other people, content to take a backseat to the callous know-it-alls who tossed their rhetoric around the block in bite-sized snippets designed to appease the masses and challenge nobody while making a big stink about absolutely nothing.

Our hero (of little merit other than existing and rubbing noses in their various messes) felt that no awkward position could upend his potential as a beacon for human improvement in the face of an ever-widening fissure that threatened to wreak havoc on the lives of those who’d become uncomfortable in their mundane rituals, and his efforts would pay off sooner than later, believe it or not. Monetary compensation would be nice, but he understood that his reward would be more significant in the grand scheme of creative endeavors, a lasting mark on the face of what would soon be called the Canon of Collective Creation, curated by none other than the forlorn dish jockey who spins yarns to pass the time while he hardens his hands under scalding water in the kitchen of a high-volume restaurant on a Saturday afternoon just after the brunch rush but right before the dinner rush, where there’s still a decent contingency of people streaming in but even more making their way out because it’s no longer fashionable to sit at a dirty table twenty minutes after the server dropped the check.

Meanwhile, in the Depths of Space [II]

The megalith atop a mound of frozen butter has begun to lean. The wind–an opponent of this lonely monument’s verticality over the past several days–has finally managed to noticeably move the giant. Now it’s only a matter of time before that butter melts, leaving no margin for error and dooming the poor behemoth to horizontality until the next time an advanced-enough species wanders over and decides that this particular rock would look better if it touches the ground with the smallest possible footprint. It could happen tomorrow, it could take a billion years. Hell, it may never happen. How it started standing in the first place is a mystery unto itself.