Mornings, lately, have been measured by mucus content. An internal barometer, sinus pressure and milliliters of slippery, green-and-grey fluid that my body somehow produces mystically, in quantities I find hard to believe. All because of some invisible spores. All because of trees having their promiscuous cloudy sex. I am a gate-crasher at this vernal orgy, and I wade through a land of overproduced seed, unlucky enough to inhale some and unluckier still to have no biological use for the stuff, so my body– invaded, it thinks– reacts appropriately; and by that I mean defensively, syrup-y, like a Venus Fly Trap, to catch all the invasive whorls and dervishes of the pollen-ilk, and eject them in the cruel catapault of a sneeze.
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Anyway, it’s about 6:30 AM PST, but 9:30 AM EST; all my watches and computer-clocks are still set to San Diego time. I believe the Clark family is slowly gearing-up for a visit to some local “tag sales”… which is what the East Coasters call Yard Sales, or Garage Sales, and the like. It’s all junk trading hands, that strange, sub-market flow of goods that is the last riverine journey of a thing before its final resting place, like the river Styx, perhaps, flowing parallel to Hades, the final orbit of a thing, un-ferried.

That said, I feel like I should remind my parents that all the best stuff will be gone by now, as local custom has the Tag Sale starting at 8:00 AM… one-and-a-half hours of goods gone now, and more being lost every minute. Not that I want anything, really– I have enough stuff, weighs me down. But I think of the books. I cannot resist a book. A book is light, but better: a book makes you, yourself, lighter. Buoys the consciousness, give you more float, makes angelic– indivisible, invisible, immutable, immortal, eternal, illocale, and agile. When my plane [of life] crashes in the sea [aquatic chaos of Babylonian remark] it will be books that act as my life-preserver, and on a raft of their paper and leather and cardstock and ink I will wait out the danger and the storm and land on the rocky shores of land.
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Getting time to get gone, now… I had wanted to write about the scarecrow I saw yesterday, real-life-crow-scaring-human-effigy, as non-Disney and non-comic as you can get. The remarkable thing about it– beyond its reality, that is– was the pose in which the creators had fixed the poor devil: arms sort of outstretched, not to the side in classic-scarecrow pose, but out in front, and up towards the sky… the head was thrown back and seemed to be staring upwards, and the entire assemblage was one of shock, a holy-shit-what’s-coming-at-me type shock, like something in the sky, or even the sky itself, was beyond comprehension and left the crow-scarer in frozen and anguished overload-of-disbelief.
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OK, off to the collapsable tables of the Great Unused, now…

Have yourselves a beautiful day.