I should be excavating the foot deep surface of my desk.  I have misplaced a very nice new 0.9 mm mechanical pencil and it’s bugging the hell out of me.  I hate losing things, and don’t often lose things, in spite of the swirling chaos in here.   I’ve looked everywhere, superficially.  It has to be somewhere under this nest of papers all around the computer screen.  Why this reluctance to tackle these heaps of papers?

Is it related to the reluctance to tackle more difficult things?  Brooding over an inability to tidy is preferable to thinking about the vexing impossibility of the larger challenge, I suppose.   People build huge edifices to protect themselves from the things they fear the most, like the reality of their eventual extinction.  Lives are spent busily making monuments to the self that will vanish without any other trace when the animating light goes out.  Denial of death is not just a deadly river in Africa.  

“You are riffing hard on the back pedal, son, because you fear to take even a mincing, tiny step forward,” says Hmmmm.  

A worn out device, like the rest of these devices… observes one to none.  

I give a fleeting thought to a lamentable thing.   In reaching the limit of my forbearance, when an old friend’s obliviousness finally cut me too deeply to tolerate, I lost something rare that I valued greatly.  Whatever else his flaws, he is a quick-witted fellow I never had to worry did not follow a divergent remark.   Lightning quick to catch on, which made it a pleasure to banter with him.   This feature, oddly, was one of the best things about my father, whose sense of humor was similarly dark, irreverent and instant.  Interestingly, both of them were often driven by self-hatred.

Speaking quickly and unchecked is a pleasure rare in this world, where we often have to explain, pull punches, consider the other person’s squeamishness and taste before riffing.  It was like rare moments in jam sessions where the kernel of an idea would pass, lightning quick, and we’d be on it at once.

Oh, well.  Time to get back to work rolling this hoop down the joyful road.