No Imagination Was Stretched In The Course Of This Production

I need a reason to do things. I need a reason to do this. I do not presently have a reason do either things or this.

I would like to apologize to a lot of people for my recent lock down and lockout. I really do love the people I would like to apologize to, and do not understand my behavior any more than anyone else does, presuming anyone has even tried to understand my behavior, and I would ask that you please not waste a single moment trying to understand my behavior.

Life should be easy. Or at least that's what I've been told by one of the wisest people on the planet. That I haven't found it particularly easy is entirely my problem.

I am hiding in plain sight, which was always, by the way, what I surmised Osama bin Laden was up to. In what I'm going to foolishly call "today's world," there is no place where it is easier to simply disappear than in the middle of a big city. Unlike Osama bin Laden, though, my final days are not being played out as just another notorious, hunted celebrity cultivating invisibility in a multi-million-dollar mansion. Mine is a relatively modest, if impossibly cluttered, hideout, and of absolutely no interest to Navy Seals, or even my neighbors (other than on those increasingly frequent occasions when they make it known that they wish I would take in my mail).

I often have reason to ask myself what it is I think I am disappearing into, and the only satisfactory answer I can come up with is "this," by which I mean a wider and more general, unsatisfactory, and ever darker this than this particular unsatisfactory this.

I'm not sure if the emphases is required in both those instances of this, but I'm going to choose to err on the side of the emphatic. At any rate, it's not a considerably wider this, not by any stretch of the imagination. The imagination, I'm afraid, has been stretched as far as it can be stretched, yet it is now no larger than a bath rug. There has unquestionably been alarming shrinkage, which would mean that "not by any stretch of the imagination" would be, at least in this instance, an entirely accurate phrase.

There has been no stretching of the imagination.

I have come to believe quite strongly that a man should save his words, even as I continue to squander several thousand of them a day.

For what should the words be saved?

(Shrugs). I guess for when they might find themselves necessary.

But surely 'this,' if I'm understanding you correctly, would not be an instance of "when they might find themselves necessary."

Perhaps not, but in the middle of a wholly unnecessary sentence the words might suddenly, as if by magic, find themselves necessary. That is one of the great puzzles of composition.

A puzzle is it?

Well, there may well be a better word that did not immediately come to mind when I attempted to describe what I called "the great puzzle of composition." I might even call it a mystery or a challenge; seldom, however, would I anymore refer to it as a pleasure. I also might not (speaking here in the "by and large" sense) even call it --it being this-- composition. Others have already played with the idea of "decomposition" but that, like much else, seems unspeakably tired to me. I have no further use for mere games, even when all that is left seems like nothing but a mere game whose rules I have never learned to understand.

This is about words, but also about something else I don't wish to try to put my finger on right now: history and personal experience have taught us that everything and nothing is irreplaceable. Particularly when there is so little left that you want and so much that you miss one moment, and so little left that you miss and so much that you want the next.

I. I. I. I. I. I. I. 

The idiot thing we call "progress" is an eclipse, permanent and permuting. It makes it impossible to breathe in or properly inhabit the past, and handicapping the future in such darkness is handicapping in the most literal sense. There's only now, as the poets and mystics and other hare-brained basket cases are so fond of reminding us, but you can't even see what might be happening in that mysterious and impossible place when it's always so fucking dark.

That's a garbage metaphor, I know, but I mean something like it all the same. And an eclipse is just really, really boring after a while.

As you were, but not as were you.